Unreality TV

For the past nine months, priests and tribal leaders in West Papua, the easternmost province of Indonesia,have been trying to warn the world that an Islamic fundamentalist movement is using their land as a trainingground. Laskar Jihad is commanded by a man trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Some of its members havealready been involved in terrorism in the islands of Ambon and Sulawesi. Since January they have establishedseven bases in West Papua. With the help of the Indonesian police and army, they have been stockpiling arms,recruiting Javanese immigrants and training them for combat.

Since the jihadis arrived, Neles Tebay, a Papuan journalist, has been sending urgent messages to newspapersand broadcasters around the world, desperate to attract attention to this protected terrorist network. Buteven when eight Pakistani mujahedin arrived, his warnings failed to generate any response in the newsrooms ofeither Europe or North America. The Papuans, ignored and abandoned by the rest of the world, have been reducedto begging the Indonesian authorities to uphold the law and disarm the jihadis before they attack.

The victims of the Bali bombing could be said to have legitimate grounds for complaint not only against theintelligence services (whose efforts have been diverted from unpicking the terrorist networks into supportingtwo futile wars) but also against the media. Both of them could and should have warned westerners thatIndonesia has become a dangerous place for them to visit.

Scarcely a month goes by without a travel feature on the country. One recent programme, about the nightlifein Bali, even featured the Sari Club. But, before the bombing, there had been no recent documentary whichcould have given viewers any understanding of what was happening in the country. On Sunday night, the BBCbroadcast a fine Panorama programme, seeking to discover who might have planted the bomb, and why the amplewarnings the intelligence services received did not prevent the attack. But one of the features ofinvestigative journalism is surely that it seeks to be wise before the event. There was, as Neles Tebaypointed out, plenty of opportunity for prior wisdom.

One of the great ironies of globalisation is that the closer we are brought together, the less we come toknow about each other. As our lives become entwined with those of people living in the most distant places onearth, our broadcast media -- through which most people in rich countries receive most of their information --are treating the rest of the world as if it is no more than a playground for people like ourselves. Ourunderstanding diminishes correspondingly, until all we know of foreigners is that, for no reason that we candiscern, they suddenly attack us. This is a tragedy not only for the people killed and injured in the SariClub; but also for the increasingly misunderstood -- and therefore increasingly feared and hated -- people ofthe poor world.

Last year, according to the media pressure group 3WE, the coverage of "hard" issues in the poorworld on British television fell to the lowest level it had recorded in 12 years of monitoring. While thebroadcast hours of international factual programmes rose slightly, nearly all of them were devoted to travel,"reality" shows, docu-soaps, sex, clubbing, surfing and similar mind-numbing cack about Britonsmaking idiots of themselves in exotic places. In the entire year, only four programmes about the politics ofthe poor world were broadcast on the five main channels, three of them on BBC2. "The internationaldocumentary", the report concludes, "is virtually dead". Even after September 11th 2001 therewas no discernable improvement.

Much of what we do see of the rest of the world on television could fairly be described ascounter-informative. Such local people as the travel programmes permit us to watch appear to have been putupon the earth only to entertain us. Many wildlife documentaries treat the regions they cover as if they areuninhabited. At the beginning of last year, BBC2 broadcast a three-part series on the Congo, which won theRoyal Television Society's science and natural history prize. The existence of human beings was, briefly,acknowledged, but the series informed us that while the Congo was "once the heart of darkness,", itis now a place of "light": an odd description of a region devastated by a civil war in which somethree million people have died. The war and its associated atrocities were not mentioned.

Television executives claim that programmes about the politics of distant parts of the world attract smallaudiences. This is true, if one compares them to such indispensable insights into the human condition as"I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here". But while several million viewers might sit uncomplaininglyin front of this pap, or at least leave the television on while they do something more interesting, thesmaller numbers who watch serious foreign documentaries will engage with them passionately. John Pilger's filmabout East Timor attracted 3 million viewers, of whom an extraordinary half a million called the switchboardafterwards, to register their shock and anger at what they had seen. It would be fair to say that theprogramme helped to change the course of history.

But films like this are relatively expensive, and unpopular with the advertisers. They can also causetrouble for the people who run the networks. When Pilger's latest documentary for Carlton TV, about theinjustices suffered by the Palestinians, was (predictably enough) attacked by an organised lobby calledHonestReporting, the channel's proprietor, Michael Green, panicked and denounced it as "a tragedy forIsrael so far as accuracy is concerned." Encouragingly, he was publicly contradicted by Carlton'sdirector of factual programmes. But such bravery is rare among television executives. The physical courage ofthe freelance camerapeople and journalists, who risk their lives to film the world's forgotten atrocities, ismatched only by the moral cowardice of the managers who then refuse even to talk to them, let alone to runtheir footage. Not long ago, the investigative film-makers' principal constraints were technical: the cameraequipment was cumbersome, the filmstock was fragile, transporting it was hazardous. Those constraints have nowbeen overcome, just as the market for their footage has disappeared.

Next month the government will publish its new communications bill. 3WE has been lobbying for a legalrequirement that broadcasters make factual programmes about international issues: a proposal which wasincluded in the white paper but dropped from the draft bill after the broadcasters complained. There's a goodchance that the pressure group will win, but the rules will be meaningless unless they are appliedenthusiastically by the regulator. The regulator, in turn, will act only if the public kicks up a fuss. Soperhaps it is time we became more interactive viewers, and began demanding less "reality TV" andmore plain reality. Otherwise we can expect the world to continue to deliver unpleasant surprises, as theneeds and the responses of its people become ever more opaque to us.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK