By Ignatius Kim
While media freedom and objectivity have for long been an ideological cornerstone of liberal democracy, their actual practice is rare and often a focus of political tension.
This will be one of the issues tackled in an SBS Television season entitled "Power, Media and Censorship", running September 17-25. Rod Webb, SBS's director of scheduling, was responsible for putting together the season.
Says Webb: "You can't ever — in fact, you shouldn't — discuss the media without discussing who owns the media, who stands to gain or whose interests are at stake in the promulgation or non-promulgation of certain information and ideas."
In that light, one of the key programs in the season is Manufacturing Consent (Sunday, September 19, 7.30 p.m.), the work of that great demystifier, Noam Chomsky.
"What Chomsky says is that the scope of ideas canvassed on television is being narrowed", explains Webb.
"People who get interviewed are often the same sort of people who can be relied upon to speak very quickly and give very concise answers so you don't waste valuable media time.
"This renders it almost impossible for complicated ideas out of the mainstream or ideas that are contrary to conventional wisdom to ever get across because, by virtue of definition, they require longer explanations."
As Manufacturing Consent makes clear, media practices cannot be isolated from the social relations within which they occur. The essence of the corporate media, like the rest of the corporate world, is the drive to accumulate more and more wealth. Accurate and objective reporting is subordinated to this primary goal.
This is starkly demonstrated in Brazil: Beyond Citizen Kane (Monday, September 20, 11.35 p.m.) where arguably the single most powerful private television network in the world, Brazil's TV Globo (whose motto, incessantly repeated during commercial breaks, is "You and TV Globo: a common view"), comes under scrutiny along with its sole owner, Roberto Marinho.
According to progressive Brazilian musician Chico Buarque, who is interviewed in this provocative documentary, "He's more powerful than Citizen Kane. Roberto Marinho is the most powerful of Brazil's 150 million inhabitants. Nothing's done without consulting Roberto Marinho. It's frightening."
One of the local programs, Fear or Favour (to be shown in the Cutting Edge slot on Tuesday, September 21, 8.30 p.m.) looks at journalistic ethics.
Among others, this documentary talks to Mike Willesee, Carmel Travers and Chris Masters. While a little limited in its analysis of news reporting, it nevertheless provides a worthwhile glimpse into the journalistic process.
"Fear or Favour actually questions the journalists. It asks questions such as, 'Do journalists need regulations? What is this freedom of speech and how far can you go?'", says Webb.
"In fact, this program gets at a big dilemma that faces a pluralist and liberal medium like SBS, in that one of our philosophies is to represent a diversity of views. We're always engaged in discussions about how far that goes.
"How do we deal with the situation in the Balkans? Do we give equal time to both sides when we personally consider one side to be the aggressor? Would we have given Hitler equal time at the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland?
"Our position is it's your job to make up your mind what the truth is, and we'll just show you as many different sides of that same truth as possible."
Yet there is an enormous social responsibility attached to the task, not to mention the practical limitations of time and resources.
Continues Webb: "The one difficulty with pluralism and the right of all sides to have an equal say is that not everything is equal. There are conflicts, oppressions, injustices in the world. There are minority groups whose interests we are charged with supporting in our charter who don't have the same resources to put across ideas as, say, Channel 9 does.
"So we have to balance the two things: to be as pluralist as we can while at the same time giving special consideration to those groups."
The season will also deal with the pornography debate in Damned in the USA (Monday, September 27, 11.00 p.m.) which will be followed after the season by a number of similar programs, including Pornography: Andrea Dworkin, an examination of Dworkin's radical feminist theory on the subject.
There will be a number of compelling films, many of which were banned in their countries of origin. In the Cinema Classic slot, there are, among others, Frank Capra's famous Meet John Doe (Saturday, September 18, 9.30 p.m.) and Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (Saturday, September 25, 9.30 p.m.).
On Face the Press (Wednesday, September 22, 8.00 p.m.), we hear Mario Vargas Llosa talk about his work, politics and media freedom in Latin America.
The "Power, Media and Censorship" season is a rich array of entertaining and thought-provoking programs.