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Mercy in media megaphoning

Thursday, April 3, 2008

LET'S BE THANKFUL, shall we, for the media? Even for media wars. They’re better, for sure, than real-bullets wars. Compare, for instance, two disputed African elections.

In Kenya at the turn of the year a murky outcome led to weeks of vicious killings. In Zimbabwe this week, an official silence tried to mask the fact that the long-entrenched president Robert Mugabe (above left) had actually lost, despite his propensity for stealing elections. A long and tense four days after the polls closed, the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai (above right) claimed a 50.3% victory. And yet ... even given this battered country’s tinderbox atmosphere (over the past few years it has seemed much more inflammable than Kenya) no violence erupted – at least not yet.

 

Instead we’re getting surrogate fighting in the media - actually, it's more like rather careful shadow-boxing.

 

In the post-ballot battle Tsvangirai summoned Harare-based reporters to give a notably restrained statement affirming that Zimbabweans had just made history, and that he wanted the country’s formal democratic procedures to play out fully before he was (those gathered understood him to mean) declared the new president. (Here his statesman-like efforts are captured on Associated Press video.)

 

 
 

And Mugabe’s megaphone, the government-owned Herald newspaper, spoke - astonishingly, but guardedly - about a likely run-off between the top two candidates (the third, former finance minister Simba Makoni, having ended a clear and distant loser) but the story effectively performed the function of admitting Mugabe had failed to win.

 

It wasn’t reported as fact, though. You wouldn't expect any such directness. Very cautiousy the paper attributed the run-off notion to political commentators’ opinions. Real news - universally acknowledged as such - came when the official Electoral Commission confirmed that Mugabe supporters had lost their majority hold on the Parliament.

 

Western outlets, relying on foreign diplomatic sources as well as some anonymous opposition party workers and highly-placed business executives, reported that the two rival camps were negotiating with each other for some agreed outcome to the Presidency question, including the once-outlandish idea of Mugabe’s resignation - and even his departure to another country. (My bet, if he goes, would be Malaysia, where he has been stashing money.)

 

Negotiations were quickly denied by both sides of course. But the outlets, notably the New York Times and the impressively Africa-savvy Christian Science Monitor, stuck to their paper guns. It’s no easy task for outsiders to report on Zimbabwe these days – a government license is needed, for a start, and reporters’ personal safety is often at risk. The Monitor’s coverage has been by-lined as written by Scott Baldauf from Johannesburg in neighboring South Africa – but a telling tagline has had to be added:

 

“A journalist who could not be named for security reasons contributed from Harare”.

 

Boldly, the Monitor has gone further than most observers and is now predicting the “Mugabe Era’s End”

 

If that is what happens, and if it happens without massive bloodshed, it will be a mercy – and no small mercy, either. More like a massive, miraculous mercy.

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY FRIDAY ON WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
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PAGES OF THE CALENDAR, TRUE TO THE CINEMATIC CLICHE, have flown away to reveal another new month - and of course it is one of those months that are media-designated to have a theme. (Which month isn't, I wonder, themed for something?)

 

I was glad this year, more than previous years, that February is Black History Month -- for the purely selfish reason that I was invited by a Southern university (Georgia Tech in fact) to screen and speak about one of my documentary films, which featured racism in America's history.

 

But I'm surprised and pleased to learn, in these increasingly prosaic times, that April is National Poetry Month.

 

"Who knew?" has been the response of many a friend I've told. I guess I mix with a lot of Philistines. (And I confess I didn't know myself until informed by Nicholas Latimer, publisher Alfred A Knopf's publicity director, when I happened to be talking to him about something else entirely.)

 

The Month's organizers (The Academy of American Poets, founded in 1934) clearly have quite a task ahead of them, familiarizing members of the great American public with poetry in their lives. Among their suggestions for celebrating the Month is one with a sweet title, "Take a Poem Out to Lunch". They provide an almost endearing amplification: "Adding a poem to your lunch puts some poetry in your day and gives you something great to read while you eat."

 

All the constituent parts of this worthy enterprise (publishers, English Literature faculties, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, poets themselves) are falling over each other to contribute, and sometimes they're duplicating each other. The Academy, through its website Poets.org, is offering a daily e-mailed supply of verse to anyone who signs up. It's called, with minimal bardic originality, "Poem-a-Day".

 

And Knopf is doing pretty much the same - favoring its own published poets, naturally enough - at Knopfpoetry.com

 

I WONDER, AS APRIL ALSO FOCUSES ATTENTION ON ZIMBABWE'S despot (see above), whether any of the 30 days' selections will include W H Auden's spare and sharp Epitaph on a Tyrant?

 

I recently thought of that 1939 poem while reading one of Mugabe's rare media interviews - with the veteran Rhodesian (and then Zimbabwean) journalist Heidi Holland - in which the dictator revealed his deeply ingrained self-pity, as well as his usual blustering blitheness about the lethal damage he's inflicted on his country.

 

Auden ends his satirical lines (probably aimed at Adolph Hitler) with a telling inversion of a conventional tribute:

 

"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter.
And when he cried, the little children died in the street".