THE scandals forming like a bleeding ulcer around the name Rupert Murdoch are important: make no bones about it.
They tell us most of what we need to know about the realities of power. There are, though, more things in heaven and earth than the smelly trail of a reptilian octogenarian.
In a society with a mayfly’s attention span, we forget simple questions. For example: if a Murdoch is the current measure of media currency, counted in column inches, how many dying infants would purchase a single Rupert?
Unicef will give a rough answer. In Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia there are two million children under five defined as acutely malnourished. Of those, half a million are suffering “life-threatening severe acute malnutrition”. And yet, converted into Ruperts, those waifs wouldn’t buy you more than a couple of paragraphs.
Media self-obsession is an easy hit. Its denizens do not talk of the gossiping Westminster village for nothing. It hardly needs to be repeated, even for irony’s sake, that no-one turns to the tabloid press for real news of the real world.
There was that war in Libya that consumed so much attention a few weeks back: is it over? There was the Arab Spring that enthralled before summer arrived: how’s that going? There is, still, a eurozone crisis and an American debt row that together threaten to make the last banking crisis seem like a rehearsal: any news? Instead, the personal protection skills of Ms Wendi Deng-Murdoch in the face of foam-related terror lead the bulletins.
At the beginning of the month, one aid worker, overwhelmed by squalor, grief and need in the Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, told the BBC: “We were supposed to have an early warning system, but what is the point of warning the rest of world when it doesn’t listen?” Ten million people are in deep trouble. Our attention is elsewhere.
Murdoch – personal wealth $6.5 billion – could avert a lot of famine. Bono, Bob Geldof and other celebrities could pay for any number of high-energy biscuits – and probably do so. Excoriating the media is a perennial game anyone can play. But east Africa’s horrors ask a different question of the prosperous West. For months, the catastrophe has been no secret. We simply were not that interested.
To begin with, there was a one-word question: again? Didn’t we amend all that? Didn’t we give to Live Aid, Comic Relief, those roving bands of high street tabard-wearing conscience bandits? Didn’t we forgive debts, and make poverty history? Doesn’t even David Cameron insist aid spending must be maintained? We pay, all of us. The collective voice makes a collective point: how often must we fix Africa? As Geldof knows better than most, compassion fatigue runs deep.
One starving African baby looks much like another: how’s that for callousness? We have all seen pictures “like that” time and again. Brutally put, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) needs a new advertising agency. Reporters in the field need a new angle to convey the stench of death and the sound of inconsolable loss. Above all, the agencies need to find a new argument for emergency feeding and the slapping of gauze on the invariable consequences of complacency.
I was 13 or 14 when the black-and-white pictures began to arrive from Biafra and the Nigerian civil war, so called. “Biafran babies”, they called them then, as the 1960s ended, dolls of thin skin and broken-stick arms with enormous heads and vast, liquid eyes beset by infernal flies. At that time, the Nazi Holocaust was imagined as the worst humanity could conjure. Here were one million dead because of guns sold by the West and sheer starvation. How could it be allowed?
E ASILY. Because warlords and corruption reigned. Because aid and trade policies were pernicious and unrelenting. Because a racist West denied the connection between a fat bloke’s snacks and a starving man’s children. Because we sold guns for “the sake of industry”. And because, we whispered to ourselves, Africans were born to starve. Biafra was repeated and repeated. Then we got bored.
It sounds paradoxical but it’s true: a world glutted with information, with hundreds of TV channels and the expanding universe of the internet, is more parochial than ever. Separated by barely 30 miles, a person in Kent no more cares about life in Calais than life on the Yukon.
We are beset by hard times too, and we have done our bit, surely. There’s truth in that: the British are big givers. It is as though we sense, dragging our gaze from the grisly spectacle of a vicious old billionaire, that human existence is not self-repairing. But our senses are dulled by repetition. Dead babies? Again? Didn’t Geldof abolish drought? Haven’t we given enough?
You might have hoped that those who were not around in 1969, who have just seen their first emaciated infant, who regard the Murdoch circus as the flatus of an expiring media model, would be galvanised. I see no sign. If the under-30s are astounded and appalled by the carnage in east Africa – and if they understand the genocidal economic process – they are keeping their insights to themselves. “Famine” isn’t trending on Twitter.
So the DEC needs a better campaign. Put the better-looking babies on YouTube, if you haven’t done so, charity beggars. Someone might text “Guilty”, £5 a pop, if pissed enough. Then we can discuss warnings, and appeals.
People – all of us – didn’t want to think about piles of corpses in east Africa because thinking was too hard, and too complicated, and too repetitive. And that weirdo Brooks woman was on the telly, for our entertainment.
The DEC is still struggling to get our attention. “Financial meltdown” is still preoccupying folk who won’t starve soon, meanwhile. The spectacle of an entire species missing the point counts, I suspect, as the phenomenon Darwin forgot.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article