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Welcome coverage, some less welcome - and some plain ridiculous

Thursday, April 24, 2008

IF WE FELT LIKE BEING Latinate, we could call it “in taedio veritas”. The tedium came through revealingly in news-anchor Steve Inskeep's voice on National Public Radio as he announced: “Just like the campaign itself, our coverage goes ON and ON – you’ll find it at our website …”

Campaign fatigue has definitely set in, and of course Hillary Clinton’s holding of Pennsylvania by 10 percentage points ensures that the media, and all of us media-watchers who are held hostage, are now staring down an even longer tunnel of nerve-jangling coverage before the Democratic nomination is finally sewn up.

 

Each side’s media-managing spinmeisters are volubly arguing that the recently ramped-up trading of low blows (photo-cartoon above left, courtesy of WordPress) and “negative” advertising won’t prove damaging to the party in the long run, and that all will be well as the Democrats unify around the eventually-selected nominee.

 

For his part Barack Obama, even in admitting what he has stooped to, tries again to take the high road and, in the self-knowing tones that often gratifyingly distinguish him as a politician, decries “the bickering that none of us are immune to”. (He also decried, in the same concession speech, “the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics” - and we all know who he meant by that.)

 

But the hope for a damage-free party surviving through the General Election could be misplaced. Numbers came flying at me during a recent lunch with Mickey Carroll, the worldly-wise (an ex-journalist, of course) Director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which revealed - remarkably - how many Clinton supporters (about a fifth, in fact) would not vote for Obama in November if their own preference failed to get the party’s nomination – and vice versa.

 

Those Quinnipiac figures have only hardened since, certainly in Pennsylvania after weeks of internecine campaigning, and when averaged out along with other pollsters’ findings on the same question they now stand at 23% of the Clintonites threatening to withhold support, and 18% of the Obamans. All pretty good news for the Republicans’ undisputed choice John McCain.

 

 

WINNING THAT GENERAL ELECTION is what it is all about, after all. On this, my contact at the topmost level of the Clinton camp tells me that, in feverish mathematical mode, they are fully convinced that Hillary (despite the punditocracy’s consensus to the contrary) will actually win a majority of the popular vote among Democrats, quite apart from the number of Convention delegates she’ll have garnered.

 

She – and even more her ever-persuasive husband – will strenuously argue to the “super-delegates” (ah, why can’t we just call ‘em party-bosses, in the old way?) that this one-person-one-vote support entitles her to the nomination, because it indicates her greater electability among the general public. The argument will of course be pressed in smoke-filled or nowadays smoke-free rooms, but also in print, on the air and in the ever more rancid blogosphere.

 

Maybe it wouldn’t all be such a wearying (and counter-productive) slugfest if the process were simply shorter. While I know this is a big country (50 states and all that) the immigrant-citizen-reporter in me can’t help recalling that British party leaderships are settled within six weeks at most - and the General Election is limited by law to a three week campaign.

 

 

**DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY FRIDAY ON WHDD - ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
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I’M TAKEN THIS WEEK BY TWO CONTRASTING TALES of “investigative journalism” - though that's too loose a label, as you’ll see - which have both been prompted by the current Zimbabwe crisis.

 

In neighboring South Africa (where President Thabo Mbeki has long attempted a hapless policy of hands-off “quiet diplomacy” toward the maniacal excesses of his counterpart immediately to the north, Robert Mugabe) a bunch of nosey, probing reporters put together an always-controversial journal that’s published in print and online. The editor, veteran muckraker Martin Welz, has a light touch to offset his journalistic seriousness, and he plays up his team’s sheer inquisitiveness by naming his magazine “Noseweek”.

 

So, two Mondays ago, Noseweek gets a phone-call from a whistleblower, as it often does. This call comes from the docks in the Indian Ocean coastal city of Durban, revealing that a Chinese cargo-ship is arriving laden with arms destined for Mugabe’s military – his country, of course, being land-locked and without a seaport of its own.

 

Noseweek checks out the story – and sure enough the cargo manifest for the ship, An Yue Jiang, shows that she’s carrying 77 tons of Chinese-made rockets, mortars, and ammunition of various grades, all valued at $1.2 million, which were ordered back in January during the already tense run-up to Zimbabwe’s disputed elections, and are now due for delivery to that country’s Ministry of Defense.

 

As soon as Noseweek splashes the news, South African citizens step in to do what their leader has declined to – take a firm stand against Zimbabwe’s ruinous dictatorship. Durban’s dockers, members of the Transport and Allied Workers Union, refuse to unload the arms, and church-members (represented by the Anglican Archbishop based in Durban) win a High Court order banning the consignment’s transportation cross-country to its intended destination. The protestors are invoking a six-year-old law South African law against supplying deadly weapons to any country that might use them to violate human rights. (Would Mugabe use them for such a purpose? Hmmm ... Any other questions?)

 

But even before the court order can be served, the ship ups anchor and sails out to sea again (above right). There is instantly an international policy fall-out. The US State Department urges other coastal African countries to refuse the ship entry … and for now they seem to be ensuring the Chinese weapons stay afloat and undelivered.

 

 

MEANWHILE IN ZIMBABWE ITSELF, the country is abuzz … with the government’s meretricious “recount” of the Parliamentary vote which gave Mugabe’s challenger Morgan Tsvangirai a clear majority in the House … with the continued refusal by election authorities to reveal the true numbers in the Presidential vote … with the mounting reports of opposition workers being abducted and beaten with metal pipes and rocks by Mugabe supporters, while others are being shot … and with the mass exodus of scared Zimbabweans across their southern border, now reported to be running at a thousand a day. And amid all this, another piece of “investigative journalism” appears.

 

It’s not devoted to any of these topics, however, and it comes from The Herald, the long established national daily (from way back in British colonial days) that these days functions as Mugabe’s prime mouthpiece.

 

The Herald publishes, across four whole pages, what it claims is a confidential internal memorandum from Harvest House, the headquarters of Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and which is purportedly written by his secretary-general Tendai Biti. It “reveals” - amazingly and incredibly - that the party has been plotting for armed intervention by Britain, plus a violent insurrection on the part of MDC supporters conducted in alliance (and this must count as the most fanciful of touches) with farmers, businesspeople, far-Rightists from South Africa – oh, and South Africa’s small opposition Democratic Alliance party as well.

 

Not to be outdone on the arms-importation front, the paper says its document proves Tsvangirai's helicopter pilot has been working with British intelligence and has flown illicit weapons into Zimbabwe. There is also a “letter” from Prime Minister Gordon Brown “confirming” the paper’s contentions, but it’s so obviously fraudulent it’s hardly worth quoting from.

 

And the public policy fall-out from The Herald’s report? Mugabe’s so-called Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, announces: “On the part of Tsvangirai, this is treasonous.” Needless to say, the penalty for treason in Zimbabwe is death.

 

So which of these “scoops” on the Zimbabwe situation deserves more credence? Which would you believe? In the circumstances THE MEDIA BEAT must merely reach for the much-used (though also abused) Fox News adage on journalistic reliability: “We report … You decide”.