Jairo Lugo-Ocando - Blaming the Victim

Blaming the Victim

How Global Journalism Fails Those in Poverty

Jairo Lugo-Ocando

First published 2015 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Jairo Lugo-Ocando 2015

The right of Jairo Lugo-Ocando to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN978 0 7453 3442 4Hardback
ISBN978 0 7453 3441 7Paperback
ISBN978 1 7837 1226 7PDF eBook
ISBN978 1 7837 1228 1Kindle eBook
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10987654321

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Acknowledgements

This book would have not been written without the generous support from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland which provided me with a series of small grants during a period of time that led directly to the key ideas expressed in this book. In a time in which research funding in the arts and social science is being ruthlessly cut by governments that have given few signs of caring for those in a state of poverty, organisations such as the Carnegie Trust despite limited resources are making all the difference in the world.

As with any type of project such as this one, it is never really the work of one single person. Behind me, several people and institutions made this book possible. Nevertheless, let me start by taking sole credit for its flaws and declare myself responsible for any criticism that derives from its reading. Having said that, I want firstly to thank Pluto Press and particularly its Managing Director, Anne Beech, for having accepted my proposal and the support, feedback and encouragement they gave me throughout the preparation of this book.

I want to acknowledge the contribution of my co-authors in three of the chapters, Patrick Malaolu, Steven Harkins and Scott Eldridge II, whose help was indispensable. I was very privileged to be writing the book while supervising their doctoral theses and thankful for their willingness to set aside time to help me develop these ideas.

I also want to thank my present and former students from the MA in Global Journalism and the MA in International Political Communication at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom for the level of discussion and engagement when I presented to them many of these ideas in my lectures and seminars.

I am equally grateful to the Centro de Investigacin de la Communicacin at the Universidad Catlica Andres Bello (UCAB) in Venezuela for the time I was allowed to spend there and work on many of these ideas, in particular to Marcelino Bisbal, Andrs Caizalez and Caroline Bosc-Bierne de Oteyza. I am also indebted to Antonio Castillo and Miguel de Aguilera at the University of Malaga in Spain for inviting me to deliver lectures on these topics over the past few years. I also want to thank Anya Schiffrin at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York for allowing me to share with her students some of the ideas expressed here and for the discussion that fallowed.

The book was born from a series of discussions with many colleagues and friends about my previous life as a practising journalist. However, I would want particularly to mention Emma Briant, Martin Conboy, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, An Duc Nguyen, Tony Sampson and John Steel. I owe to all of them a great deal for their ideas, suggestions and comments over the past two years.

Thanks to my partner Corinne Fowler, who was not only a second pair of eyes but also became a challenging testing ground for some of the ideas here expressed. My three sons Edgar, Victor and Rafael deserve however more than a thanks. They deserve all my ultimate recognition for showing infinite patience with me and my time-consuming obsession to finish this book. Their kisses and hugs in the morning, after a sleepless night, were the most important motivation of all in my life.

Finally, I want to dedicate this book to the memory of my late young brother, Adalberto Daniel Lugo Morales, who shared my quest for a better world. I hope one day his daughters, Sofia and Valeria, now perhaps too young, can read this book and appreciate how inspiring he was for all of us and what a difference he made in our lives.

Introduction

Back in the early twentieth century, one of Americas finest journalists and authors, Upton Sinclair, wrote The Brass Check, one of the first comprehensive studies about journalism practices and media ownership. In The Brass Check, Sinclair warned that the United States had a class-owned press, representing class interests, protecting class-interests with entire unscrupulousness, and having no conception of the meaning of public welfare (1919: 318). Others such as Hamilton Holt saw journalists as tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes (1909: 4). In both cases, it was perhaps a harsh assessment of the overall state of the press at the time but these judgements do reflect some truth that even today resonates in the tone and approaches that still dominate news narratives with regards to poverty. News media today still offer simplistic explanations about why people live in a state of poverty, explanations that reflect dominant discourses that are shaped by class ideology.

Indeed, the two-times Pulitzer Prize winner, Nicholas Kristof, in his 2 November 2011 column in the New York Times, suggests that there is a solution to problems such as climate change, poverty and civil wars: birth control. For Kristof, the impact of overpopulation is clear:

One is that youth bulges in rapidly growing countries like Afghanistan and Yemen makes them more prone to conflict and terrorism. Booming populations also contribute to global poverty and make it impossible to protect virgin forests or fend off climate change. Some studies have suggested that a simple way to reduce carbon emissions in the year 2100 is to curb population growth today. (Kristof 2011a)

Sadly, these simplistic views are still widely held by many in newsrooms around the world, despite the fact that the overwhelming depletion of nature occurs at the hands of the richest individuals, who not only consume the most but also produce and supply the weapons that fuel the wars that have devastated places such as Afghanistan and Yemen.

Regrettably, we have heard similar arguments, albeit from different standpoints, for almost two hundred years. The singularity of Kristofs article is that, in many ways, it reflects the prevalent views among the most powerful media in the world today. Eric Ross calls it the Malthus Factor, an ideological paradigm which tends to blame the poor for environmental degradation (1998: 73). In the case of the so-called global media, we could also refer to these views as an Orwellian doublespeak that not only embraces a false paradigm as a discourse of truth, but that also evades reality by transferring responsibilities to the victims. In so doing, the international media seem to obviate, deliberately, the underlying circumstances that foster poverty, while displacing responsibilities to parallel political spheres where the possibility of any real action can be blocked.