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From the lesser areas, greater communication

Thursday, December 17, 2009

AT LEAST THE WORLD'S MEDIA are getting a last-minute crescendo to report on. Not because top leaders are now all jetting in to Copenhagen, to make speeches limited by summit stage-managers to 3 minutes each ( - no, I wouldn’t call that a crescendo either).

And not because protestors outside the meeting have been tear-gassed. Rather, the climactic endgame is the result of a tense stand-off between the two biggest polluters in the world.

 

These United Nations-organized conferences, I know so well from experience, are tightly choreographed, with the closing communiqué or even a treaty agreement written well in advance (with maybe some tweaking done on site during the final hours). In this case – and I think tellingly for the future – the crucial battle holding things up is between those newly-paired potentates of the 21st century, the United States and China.

 

Noteworthy, too, though representing less of a shift in global diplomacy’s tectonic plates (more a restatement of the same old, same old international power divide) has been a more general upset to the UN’s stately apple-cart. The many poor nations of the world ganged up – in a familiar pattern, yes – on the fewer richer nations, demanding financial help if they are to be held to new, constraining emission standards.

 

To review worldwide media coverage of Copenhagen is to see once more the abiding formula in international relations - that the rich and powerful hold all the cards, and that the poor and powerless can only bleat, usually to no avail. One of east and central Africa’s most pointed media commentators, Joseph Rwagatare of Rwanda’s influential newspaper and website New Times, spoke for many this week. The rich world’s attitude on global warming “lends itself to cynicism”, he said bluntly. “Who cares whether Bangladesh is submerged or Mozambique disappears, or picturesque islands in the Pacific are lost for ever?”
 

The obvious and too easily overlooked answer to the “who cares?” question is  … other threatened nations.

 

From my own region of origin, the British Isles, it has fallen to the least (geographically speaking) of the entities comprising the United Kingdom, the principality of Wales, to speak up for all those lesser nations who get disenfranchised in global trade-off sessions.

The national newspaper for Wales, the Western Mail, based in the principality’s capital, Cardiff (which is after all undeniably west of London) has been determinedly alerting its citizenry to points of identification with the Third World. Wales may not exactly be a small island-nation, but jutting out as it does into the Irish Sea it possesses nearly 1700 miles of coastline, compared with just 200 miles of a land border with England.

The low-lying, Ganges Delta-dominated stretches of Bangladesh have engaged the Welsh paper’s sympathy, and some national self-interest, too. After highlighting the story of a Bangladeshi woman whose new-born baby was washed away in a flood, the Mail plainly points out: “Climate change is claiming lives. Imagine the population of Cardiff dying due to floods or drought. In 10 years the population of Wales would be wiped out”.

The journalistic device - known in many a newsroom as “bringing it home”- is tried and tested. And simply effective, too.

   

 

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THE FAR FROM POPULOUS WELSH are disproportionately represented among Britain’s high-achieving communicators, notably as actors, singers, and writers.
 

Singing and acting first.

 

Catherine Zeta-Jones (above left) long before she married into Hollywood royalty as Mrs Michael Douglas and before she won an Oscar in the movie of Chicago, graduated from Welsh beginnings into playing a much-admired ingenue in the charming British TV dramatization of H E Bates’ 1950s classic The Darling Buds of May. This week she made a big leap, into a Broadway debut – as the all-too-experienced and aptly-forenamed actress, Desiree Armfeldt, in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. His wry and faintly satirical musical play, based on an Ingmar Bergman movie, has not been seen on the Great White Way since its original successful run back in 1973.

Zeta-Jones is an appealing onstage presence, in this production from London directed by Trevor Nunn. But I have to say she throws away her part’s best moment, with an over-emphatic rendering of that ur-Sondheim anthem of regret “Send in the Clowns” , even to the extent of seeming to lose breath control and rendering line-endings inaudible.

 

The show is actually stolen by age and greater experience. In the form, that is, of Angela Lansbury, 84 years old (above center) who to my knowledge has nary a drop of Welsh blood in her - though she archly drops an octave to the register of a Welsh choir’s bass section when intoning, as Desiree’s even more worldy-wise mother, “I am deeply suspicious” about her daughter’s scheming.  More to the point, her breathily, heart-achingly delivered lament for the lost promise of past “Liaisons” is a theatrical tour-de-force.

   

 

WELSH ANCESTRY COMES UP again – and this time unchallenged communications success too - with a new memoir from Sir Harold Evans (above right) - as Welsh a name as Jones, and without any intrusive complication like "Zeta".

 

Harry - as this venerable journalist is known to all his friends, fans and rare (doubtless envious) detractors - was born to a Welsh family in Newton Heath, Manchester (50 miles into England from the Welsh border and, I’m glad to reflect, a scant urban mile from where I attended high school).

 

His legendary career spans being a preternaturally young editor of a sturdy Northern England newspaper … through running the London Sunday Times in its most glorious years, as a campaigning, investigative weekly … to a transfer onto the Establishment pinnacle of The Times (the daily of that ilk in London) only to lock horns vainly with its then-new owner Rupert Murdoch … a move to New York with his wife Tina Brown (who separately trod a remarkable journalistic path of her own) … and an apparently easeful shift via magazine-editing into book-publishing at the head of Random House. Since then he’s authored the hefty works The American Century and They Made America, and now this endearingly personal, and also professionally revealing volume My Paper Chase (from publishers Little, Brown).

 

The book tells how it was on a Welsh beach, at the working-class resort of Rhyl, that Evans’ critical, inquiring journalism had its formative beginnings. At the age of 11 he watched his insatiably curious father - a train driver - questioning haggard and exhausted British soldiers who were recuperating there after World War II’s Dunkirk operation. That retreat from France, which had been hailed as proud, and even heroic by a jingoistic national press (“Bloody Marvellous!”, said a Daily Mirror headline) was in fact a mess, the elder Evans learned, and was regarded by these surviving troops only with dejection, not pride - or even much relief.

 

The younger Evans appreciated early on how in war truth becomes “The First Casualty”, to quote a book-title from one of the ace Sunday Times writers he was later to encourage, Phil Knightley.

 

Today America’s longest-established press club, The Society of Silurians (a self-deprecating reference to their virtually geological age) will celebrate Evans at a New York luncheon. I shall be feasting not just on the usual salmon, but on the even more dependable revelations and insights of this walking, talking journal of record.
 

 

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