THE ANNOUNCEMENT that Simon Haselock has been appointed "media commissioner" for Iraq is bad news for a free Iraqi media. I know Simon extremely well and like him, but there is good cause for considering his appointment to the country's top media administrative position a mistake.
Simon Haselock comes to Iraq from similar postings in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. In neither country was his career marked by success in supporting local media.
In Sarajevo, Haselock served as media spokesman for the Office of the High Representative, the European agency governing the Bosnians in the aftermath of the Dayton Agreement. In Kosovo, he became media commissioner.
The problem, in a nutshell: He's British, and holds to a European view of how media should work, in terms of public responsibility, free expression, libel law, and similar issues. Haselock and others like him attempted to impose a European media regime on the Bosnian and Kosovar journalists, and there is every indication the same effort will be made in Iraq.
Put simply, this means that a governmental body will supervise media. It has already been reported that Haselock has written a proposal for control of broadcast and print media, including the establishment of state electronic media and the appointment of a board that will handle "complaints about media excesses" and levy fines for misconduct. These are exactly, down to the boilerplate vocabulary, the policies that were tried in Sarajevo and Prishtina. They failed miserably, and sometimes grotesquely.
IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, the stated mission of foreign media administrators embodied pure political correctness:
It was to separate media from nationalist self-expression and political parties. This meant that although Bosnian Muslims felt they had survived a deliberate attempt at genocide, and while Serbs and Croats felt they had legitimate communal demands to put forward, their journalists were forbidden from dealing with these topics. The argument of the "internationals," as the foreigners in the Balkans love to style themselves, was that any such commentary would constitute hate speech and would incite further violence.
This policy was not only foolish, given the recent tragic history of the country, but also hypocritical. Nowhere else in Europe are aggrieved national communities--the Basques in Spain or the Celts in the U.K., to name the most obvious examples--forbidden from expressing their demands. Terrorism in these neighborhoods has not been viewed as a pretext for wholesale censorship. Furthermore, no other European country forbids media ownership by, or alignment with, political parties.
Bosnian television, in particular, has been subjected to harsh exactions, including a stated policy that the country had "too many" stations. Foreign administrators did not notice that Bosnia is extremely mountainous and that local stations were the cheapest way to quickly establish a media system. Instead, vast sums of foreign pelf were strewn far and wide, with the goal of fostering "public broadcasting."
The most infamous example was something called the Open Broadcast Network (OBN)--an experiment on which the United States and the European Union together wasted $17 million. The OBN, a multi-culti television network, failed after being handed off $9 million by the United States.
|
