By Kannan Salazar
BANGKOK | 14 November 2024 (IDN) — Today geo-politics drives the news agenda in the Asian region where many countries have seen a dramatic rise in their economic prosperity in the past three decades that have catapulted nations and societies from the ‘third world’ to the ‘first world’ within a generation that took the West three centuries to achive, and that too by plundering two-thirds of the world.
Asia’s peaceful rise should be a model fo the global community, but geo-politics-based reporting uncritically adopted from western media reporting is threatening to poison the minds of the people in the region and threaten its peaceful rise.
This is the message refelected in a new book ‘GeoPolitics and the Media in Asia and the South Pacific: Pulling in Different Directions’ released by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK) that is a timely publication that sheds light on how the media is fermenting geopolitical conflict across Asia and the South Pacific pulling countries in different directions.
In the opening paragraph of the concluding chapter, author Dr Kalinga Seneviratne quotes popular Indian news anchor, Palki Sharma of Firstpage, who says: “If you want to poison the people, you poison their stories. When you poison their stories you contaminate their minds, and it’s worse than dropping bombs. Then you take away the self-confidence of a country. You devastate their morale.”
Seneviratne, who is a Sri Lankan born Australian journalist and international communication scholar, follows up this quote by noting that, throughout this book, “I have been trying to analyze and present issues and perspectives that may be poisoning one’s mind against another. This is what geopolitics is all about today. But, as pointed out in this book, there is ample scope for cooperation to increase our prosperity and encourage peaceful co-existence. Instead, we are subjected to a barrage of propaganda.”
Seneviratne, who has worked as a journalist for over 30 years, and has lectured in Singapore, Thailand, Fiji, Kyrgyzstan, India and Australia, attributes the current trend of “poison journalism” to the adversarial culture of the news media shaped by over half-a-century of training journalists to be “watchdogs” of abuse of power by governments, but, without emphasizing their responsibility towards promoting a harmonious society.
This book has very little communication theory—perhaps because he believes western-centric communication theory is outdated. Only real communication theory you find is in chapter 1, where intercultural communication and ideological supremacy mindset theory are briefly discussed.
The ideological supremacy mindset
The ideological supremacy mindset is well illustrated by a quote by Dr Ram Madhav, Director of India Foundation, in the Preface. Speaking of Indian travellers to Southeast Asia in ancient times, he notes, “traders, monks, and travelers did not come across ‘savages’ in the lands they encountered; they came across people living in similar civilized societies like them”.
He notes that today, many of the young people in Asia are ignorant of their histories, their cultures and even their own religious heritage. Thus, the second chapter on the history of the ancient Silk Routes, should be compulsory reading for them. There are lessons in the way those trade routes were developed, to analyse and report on the current Belt and Road Initive (BRI)—China’s attempt to revive these trade routes. The West has branded it as a “debt trap” and has been carrying out a huge propaganda campaign masquerading it as news.
At the end of the second chapter, Seneviratne discusses how the real “Debt Traps” originated with the Bretton Woods system after the Second World War, and how by the 1980s, the missionaries of that system—International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—have created the ‘Third World Debt Crisis’ which still continues. The book is critical of the western media reporting formula of referring to Western development assistance as “aid” while similar aid from China is labelled as “debt traps”. There are ample examples given in the book from Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and the Pacific to illustrate this.
Role of the military-industrial complex
Chapter 3 discuss another misnomer in western media reporting—what he calls the “western mantra” of protecting the rules-based order, from Chinese threats. He questions whose order are they talking about and points out how the West (and its allies like Japan) violates the very rules.
A very important issue that is also discussed both in chapter 3 and the concluding chapter, is the need to address the role of the military-industrial complex (MIC) that drives today’s geo-political battles and militarization. He calls for more research on the links between MIC and the media.
Chapters 5 to 9 focus on specific regional issues and its media exposure and looks at some disturbing developments where old colonial powers are trying to ferment conflict in the region. In chapter 5, India’s muscular diplomacy in the region—sometimes in covert military alliance with the West—is critically examined, warning that it may drive the smaller South Asian countries away from India’s orbit into a Chinese sphere of influence.
Chapter 6 is devoted exlusively to Sri Lanka, where the author was born and raised. The heading of the chapter ‘curse of being the pearl in the Indian Ocean’ reflects the thrust of the discussions. There is extensive discussion on how propaganda and misrepresentation has labelled China as a “debt trap” predator grabbing Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port and creating the 2022 debt crisis. Seneviratne argues that both are false narratives and in the latter, the news reports were based on blatant lies, ignoring ther role played by Western ISBs (hedge funds) in Sri Lanka’s debt crisis.
The border between India and China in the Himalayan mountain range is the longest disputed border in the world, and its potential to become a new geo-political hotspot or a zone of peace is discussed exclusively in chapter 6, drawing widely from a book by former Indian diplomat Phunchok Stobdan on the potential for what he calls the “Buddhist Himalayas” to become a hotbed of geopolitical conflict, with “outside powers” exploiting the clamour for Tibetan independence by Tibetan youth in India as the trigger for armed conflict.
Chapters 8 focus on Southeast Asia questioning the US role in fermenting conflict in the South China Sea, while critically analyzing China’s claims for much of the maritime territory there. The chapter 9 is exclusively focusing on the Philippines because at the time of writing tensions were increasing in the region with Philippines President Marcos’s tilt towards the US, and the latter seemingly using the Philippines to trigger conflict in the region. This chapter is very critical of how outside Western powers are fermenting conflict using a complaint government in Manila, which is worrying its ASEAN partners.
South Pacific
Chapters 10 and 11 focus on the South Pacific, as the autor has spent 18 months between 2022-2023 at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, when a ferocious geo-political battle was brewing up with China on one side and the US tagged by Australia on the other side. Seneviratne is scathingly critical of the Australian media when it comes to reporting anything about China in the Pacific. Citing many case studies and articles, he describes Australian journalism as “China-bashing smear journalism”.
The two chapters on the Pacific deal with a range of issues—from impact of climate change on communities to the media—meaning Australian and Western, and their local echo chambers—creating a geo-political battlefield in the Pacific. It is pointed out that what the Pacific need is assistance to create and implement their ‘Blue Pacific’ strategy—the security threat they face is not military but climate change.
Li Wei, theDean of the School of International Studies at China’s Renmin University, is quoted in the final chapter, where he points out that the US system is based on its military alliance system, “which is relatively exclusive and rigid”. In contrast, China’s diplomacy is founded on a global network of partnerships that focus on cooperation, “which is more open and flexible”.
Developing cooperation means developing more understanding and respect, while developing military alliances is to identify threats and prepare for war.
Thus, in the preface, Seneviratne says that the West’s argument based on protecting a rules-based order boils down to the attitude of lack of respect for other points of view and inability to understand these points of view on an equal basis.
“The West, unfortunately, does not seem to understand that the rules they talk about have been rules they have set themselves—with hardly any consultations with non-Westerners—and these are designed to benefit themselves. Now it is challenged, not only by China but most of the rest of the non-Western world. To understand why it is being challenged is to learn to respect other points of view,” he argues.
If you are used to the western point of view only, you may think this book is too critical of the West. What this book does is to give a lot of the other points of view (from non-Western sources) and if you dare to read through it, this book is a good resource to broaden your intercultural understanding of the world. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
