TELEVISION'S POWER MUST BE HARNESSED TO BEST OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL TO THIRD WORLD TELEVISION FORUM
Press Release
SG/SM/6801
PI/1096
TELEVISION'S POWER MUST BE HARNESSED TO BEST OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR, SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL TO THIRD WORLD TELEVISION FORUM
19981119 Following is the statement of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the opening of the third World Television Forum at Headquarters on 19 November:It's wonderful to see you all here today. Let me offer at the outset, on behalf of the United Nations and myself, sincere thanks to all those who helped this event come about. It is encouraging, indeed, that this forum has already won such wide support, when it is only in its third year.
Likewise, we are honoured to have such an eminent list of participants. I would like to extend a warm welcome to our keynote speaker, Conrad Black. Your holdings, Conrad, stretching as they do from Jerusalem to Montreal, from London to Chicago, make you a walking symbol of the globalizing power of the media. And I am pleased that Rupert Murdoch, from whom this Forum heard a memorable address last year, will be with us again today. How nice to know that, on this occasion at least, the two of you are joining forces.
As the presence of both of you here tells us, there are certainly strong personalities behind the news today. That is beyond question. And the powerful personalities behind the television industry reflect the unprecedented power and promise of the medium. What is being questioned is the lack of strong personalities in the news. Why, people ask, do we not see more heroes and leaders to inspire us? In this country, two events that dominated our TV screens recently brought that question to people's lips. They were both stories of individuals testing their limits.
John Glenn's story was that of a hero beating his own performance in space 36 years ago; Mark McGwire's and Sammy Sosa's story was that of two sportsmen beating the home run record of a predecessor 37 years ago. All of them had people lamenting the absence of more heroes in the media. Where, people asked, are the others who take risks to test the limits of human achievement?
Have humans become less capable of achieving remarkable things? It is doubtful. Given the pace of human progress -- not least in your field of
information and television technology -- the answer would seem to be the contrary. Rather, it seems as though the very onslaught of progress, the sheer mass of human endeavour, has overshadowed and dwarfed the individuals behind it.
Heroes that dominate the world's consciousness seem to have become an endangered species. It may even look as though they are heading for extinction. Globalization has made human endeavour stretch so far and wide that we find the stories almost impossible to take in. The research behind every achievement is teamwork that has crossed and recrossed borders and oceans countless times. The people involved seem so many that we cannot hope to know their names, numbers or nationalities anymore -- far less their faces or their favourite songs. And with that shift, the story has become harder to grasp.
For so long, we have hitched the wagons of our personal beliefs and outrage to individual heroes and villains. Increasingly, we are being asked to focus on faceless manifestations of good and bad -- like medicine and technology, like terrorism and pollution. The challenge now is to look for the individual that encapsulates human progress, to give human endeavour a human face.
We are nearing the end of a tumultuous century that has witnessed both the best and worst of human endeavour. The challenges we face grow ever more complex. But, like it or not, modern communications mean that we are connected, inextricably and irrevocably. Those connections have helped give birth to a new phenomenon -- an emerging sense of global citizenship and responsibility. We saw it at work in the movements that spurred governments to negotiate the treaty banning anti-personnel landmines last year, and the Statute of the International Criminal Court this year.
In those movements, if anywhere, we can find the heroes of today. They are a new expression of global people-power -- individuals and groups animated by humanitarian and human rights concerns, supported by world public opinion and united by weapons that would prove more powerful than any landmine, e-mail and the Internet. As the success of these movements goes to show, the tools of information technology are aspects of globalization which most of us can grasp easily and welcome almost wholeheartedly.
But, we face a more profound challenge -- to understand better the emerging forces and forms of globalization, to shape them to serve our needs and to respond effectively to their consequences. There is a great deal of talk today about life in what Marshall McLuhan declared 31 years ago to be our "global village". But, if this village is to be a truly desirable place for
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all of us on this planet, it must be embedded within and guided by broader frameworks of shared values and principles.
This poses an unprecedented challenge to those who have the unparalleled power to bring us the news every day. Many have striven to rise to this challenge early on. CNN even banned the word "foreign" from its newsroom vocabulary. And yet, many countries have seen a regrettable decline in coverage of international news over the past decade. A typical American network that carried more than 1,000 international news reports in 1988 was down to less than 350 in 1996.
It may be that international stories are harder to convey, because they are harder to grasp. It may be that they don't bring in the same ratings and earnings as the latest domestic furore. It is certainly true that they are expensive. I have recently heard of suggestions for major networks to pool more of their resources in covering international news.
I do not want to tell you how to do your job -- even though many in television have no hesitation in telling the rest of us how to do ours. But, it could be that such an arrangement would allow more international coverage that goes beyond disasters and outright conflict.
Look at the tragic toll taken by Hurricane Mitch in Central America. Correspondents rightly reported that the tragedy was all the greater because unprecedented stability and prosperity had only recently taken hold in the region. But the discerning viewer asked, why were we not told about what the region had built up until the hurricane tore it down? Why was good news no news?
What I do know is that no one is immune any longer from what happens in another country. The average household is said to put their children, their safety and their jobs first. And who among us would not? But our jobs do not depend only on the local factory, but on a global economy that can sustain it. Our safety depends not only on the local police station, but on an environment safe from pollution, nuclear menace, drugs and terrorism. Our children depend not only on their school or their soccer matches, but on a planet in which they can hope to build a decent future.
Is not an Australian construction worker as exposed to risk from a damaged ozone layer, as he is from a falling roofbeam? Is not an American schoolgirl as threatened by heroin grown 3,000 miles away, as she is by a dangerous traffic intersection on her way to school? Are we not all as diminished by minarets lying broken on the ground in the Balkans, as we are by an act of racist vandalism in our hometown?
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If we do not know the identities of the actors behind much of human endeavour, it renders our globalized world arena open to abuse. Uncivil society threatens to unravel the gains achieved by civil society. The same globalizing processes that enable us to communicate transnationally are also exploited by criminal networks, drug traffickers and money launderers. No country can escape the consequences of global warming or ozone depletion. The consequences of the Asian financial crisis are anything but limited to Asia and anything but confined to the financial. They are suffered by developing nations everywhere and they range from mass unemployment to mass infant malnutrition.
No nation, no matter how powerful, can deal with these problems alone. They can only be addressed multilaterally, by the United Nations and by other international institutions. But they must be understood by people everywhere, because we need the will and support of the people to succeed.
Even if the enormity and apparent diffuseness of the issues make us feel uncomfortable and insecure, that is no excuse to turn our backs on knowledge. It is a moral imperative to look them directly in the face. And so we need the power of television as a partner in knowledge. We need the story of human endeavour -- whether villainy or heroism, individual or collective -- to be told. And we need to ensure this invaluable tool of education and enlightenment is accessible to audiences everywhere.
I have every hope that this forum will help us explore ways to do that together. If we start from the premise that international news coverage is not only morally desirable, but necessary to the well-being and even survival of the planet, I have no doubt that we can find ways to harness your power, talent and technology to the best of human endeavour. I have every faith we can find ways of joining forces against the worst of it.
If journalists have anything in common with us, in the United Nations, it is perhaps this more than anything -- the belief that what we do is worth taking risks for.
And the risks are all too real. This year, we in the United Nations have lost many of our own. I know that you are no strangers to such bereavements. In the first six months of this year alone, 17 journalists in 13 countries were reported killed. All of you, no doubt, know at least one colleague who has died for the story. I would like to pay tribute to the courage of journalists everywhere who take risks every day in the cause of truth. I would like to say that they did not live and die to see the story of the world that came after them go untold. We owe them that much, for they are our heroes too.
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With all due respect to three American living legends, we cannot rely for inspiration on young sportsmen exceeding the performance of other sportsmen 30 years ago, or veteran astronauts exceeding their own performance of 30 years ago.
We have got to exceed our own performance. We have got to explore new horizons. We have got to believe in our ability to manage change for the good of humanity. And, we have to learn to believe that doing so produces its own kind of heroes. If every age gets the heroes it deserves, then surely this age is capable of producing many. As T.S. Eliot promised, with the voice of this calling, humanity shall not cease from exploration.
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