 So what's it called? The state of the global media? Boy, that's a difficult subject, state of the global media. Last night I decided to read the committee for the protection of journalists. And they produce, not every year but occasionally they produce a very useful list of the countries that most highly censor their media. So I decided to go and take a look at the list. And, you know, it was interesting to see who made the cut. So in the last list that they produced, the country which apparently most censors its media is Eritrea. And then second, let me just read the top 10 countries. Eritrea starts is the most censored media. Then North Korea. Then interestingly, Saudi Arabia is the number third. Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Iran, China, Myanmar and Cuba. That's the list that the committee for the protection of journalists has decided are the countries that most heavily censor their media. Now obviously they have an understanding of censorship and their understanding of censorship is quite conventional. In other words, where perhaps media outlets are not allowed to be in the private sector. In other words, they are publicly held or state run media outlets. The more state run media outlets, the greater the censorship is the understanding. The other kind of metric is these are countries where journalists get arrested, let's say, formally arrested by the state. Perhaps for stories they've done, etc. It's quite a conventional understanding of censorship. I thought given that North Korea is so much in the news, you know, the flash point. One of the three flash points for a war that the United States might start, you know, this afternoon. The United States might go to war this afternoon against Iran. It might go to war this afternoon against North Korea. It might go to war this afternoon against Venezuela. These are the three wars that I believe might happen, you know, within hours. We don't know. Partly we don't know because we're also now in the position of having a president of the United States who's deeply erratic. And his erraticism might come out, you know, in ways we don't expect. It's very hard to forecast with the reason when the madman is in control. You know, Richard Nixon had a madman theory of the US presidency. The more mad you act, the less predictable you are, the more people are scared of you and therefore they don't cross you. In some ways Donald Trump has adopted the madman theory. So let's take North Korea. Let's not debate whether North Korea's media is censored or not. Okay, because that's crazy. I mean, we can come back to that. Is North Korea's media censored? Let's set that aside. Let's ask the other question. Is the Western media censored when it comes to talking about North Korea? I think it's an interesting thought experiment. It's kind of boring for me to come here and talk about North Korea's media being censorist towards journalists, etc. Because that's the so-called conventional wisdom, right? I think the other question is maybe a little more interesting. Let's call it Western media. But Western media is inadequate because after all, Indian media borrows almost all its foreign news from the Western media. So let's just call it a shorthand, the corporate media. Or maybe even if we were being more straightforward and less evasive. If I wasn't being evasive, I might even say the imperialist media. Okay, so let's go for the sake of this presentation. Let's call it the imperialist media. What does the imperialist media share with the world about North Korea? There was an interesting moment last week when the American comedy show host Jimmy Kimmel sent a journalist on the street with an empty map and asked Americans, ordinary Americans, to tell this person with the map, where is North Korea? It's a basic question, you know, you want to bomb a country. Well, at least you should know where it is on the map. I mean, I'm not even asking you what is the capital of North Korea. That's too much to ask of somebody, perhaps. But at least they should know where it is on the map. Because, you know, the last thing you want to do is to fire your missiles into the wrong country. I'm not saying that ordinary citizens are targeting missiles. I'm not silly, but it's a good idea, practical idea. Well, what Jimmy Kimmel's reporter found was that most Americans that they met on the street had no idea where North Korea was. No idea on the world map. Some people were picking South America, some people thought it was in Africa. They had no clue. This is interesting. So the basic fact of where the country is is not available to them. In fact, if you go back and look at how the imperialist media, corporate media, western media, whatever we call it, reports on North Korea, something interesting comes up. In other words, you know, generally there are some protocols for journalists who cover foreign affairs. And one of the protocols is to get the basic facts right. So what you find with North Korea is any story is allowed. Any outlandish story, you know, that dogs are being eaten in the countryside. Or that, in fact, the leader is dead. In fact, there was a parody website that ran a story saying Kim Jong-un was dead. And the stock market in South Korea tanked. Because the parody story was taken as real. Why was it taken as real? Because really every reporter in North Korea has a parody story. Nobody has stepped back from the cartoonish descriptions of North Korea to ask basic questions. You know, when you write as a journalist, particularly when you write about foreign matters, matters outside the context of the country. Look, if I'm writing for the Hindu about Tamil Nadu politics, I don't have to explain the Dravidian movement. I don't have to explain what's happening in AI, DMK. Although these days it's a pretty good idea to explain to people, you know, what the complexities are. You don't have to do that because in general the readers, you know, understand something of the context of what's happening when you're in a domestic market. Generally people understand. If you're writing about, you know, Indian politics, generally people know who Amit Shah is. But when you write about foreign affairs, there's an obligation to explain. In other words, the explanation, taking the reader out of their context and providing them with the process of a place's history and its context is central. Without that, how can a reader understand how that country's people think, how its political leadership makes decisions? You know, these are, it seems to me, essential things to understand. With North Korea, there is no attempt to explain or understand its contemporary history. I mean, let's accept that North Korea is a paranoid country. Let's accept that cartoonish description, okay? It's a paranoid country. Fine. High level of secrecy. Reporters coming in, always tracked. All this is true. Fine, let's accept that. Now, if you're a sensible, sensitive human being, and even more, if you're a sensitive journalist, the question you ask is why is it paranoid? Not, look, it's paranoid. They eat dogs. Their leader is crazy. He has a horrible haircut. He's put on weight so he can look like his grandfather. You know, that's not reporting. That's, in a sense, sensationalism, a cartoonish depiction of a country. You'll have to ask the question, why are they secretive? Why are they scared of being obliterated? Now, if you ask that sensitive journalistic question, which is, I think, an important approach, important direction to take, then you have to confront North Korea's history. You have to confront the fact that North Korea is actually in a war. There was no end to the American war in Korea that began in the 1950s. There's only been a very provisional ceasefire. The war has not ended. There is no peace agreement. They are still in a state of war. If you go back and look at that war, the United States bombed that country mercilessly. You know, bombing dams, flooding fields, destroying infrastructure, pushing its political leadership deeper and deeper into caves. The reason they are terrified is they have a contemporary experience of being near annihilation. It's one of the few countries, Vietnam another, which has actually experienced the full weight of American aerial capacity. You know, the United States has the capacity to obliterate countries with its aerial power. And Korea, very early on, right after the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experienced mass destruction of cities and, as I said, mass destruction of agriculture. You'd have to also therefore understand, if you accept that this is a fact, which indeed it is, where, you know, the commander of American forces essentially said, we'll bomb them back to the Stone Age. This isn't the public record. You don't have to invent this stuff. Journalists can find this. There are historians, people like Bruce Cummings, who have written about this. You'd also find that the Americans collaborated in the Korean War with former Japanese fascists. You know, including, by the way, the grandfather of the current head of government in Japan, Mr Abe, his grandfather was a fascist. There was collaboration with these people to go and get Kim Il-sung, to somehow kill him. This man, the grandfather of Abe, was in a unit that was tasked with killing the grandfather of Kim Jong-un. You know, there are deep and pernicious histories involved here. They are scared of massive attack again. The war has not ended. You'd have to explore that. You'd have to educate your readers about that. Then you'd have to also educate your readers about much more contemporary history. In other words, they'd say, why do the North Koreans have a nuclear program? Shouldn't they be feeding their population? It's a very fair question. It's a very humane question. I mean, you know, if there is starvation, shouldn't that be the priority of a government over, you know, building a nuclear program? Sensitive, sensible journalists would ask, what has been the impact of the American regime change operations in Iraq and Libya in particular on the North Korean government and its people? Because after all, both Iraq and Libya voluntarily got rid of their nuclear weapons program and therefore disarmed themselves and prepared themselves for an American attack. If you were a sensible and sensitive person and you actually took seriously contemporary history and you went and talked to the North Koreans, which is not that difficult. After all, I think they are human beings. I think they do like to talk to people because after all, we know this from them having given interviews to the few people who've asked them this question. How has the history of United States and NATO intervention in Libya affected your policymaking? And they will tell you directly that, yes, we see the example of Libya in particular as a singularly instructive example. The Libyans had a nuclear weapons program which they gave up, therefore disarming themselves and opening the door to massive NATO attack regime change and the destruction of Libya. They can turn around and tell their people, say, look, look at Libya, look at what happened. Do you want us to disarm? I'm not saying that their policy is the correct one. As a journalist, I don't need to take a position on that. But I need to provide the context and the process of decision making so that my viewers or my readers can understand a little of why the North Korean government is making the kinds of decisions it's making. Is it making it merely because it's crazy? That's what the media suggests. The imperialist media, corporate media, western media, whatever you call it, suggests generally in their reporting on North Korea that they're crazy, insular, mad, defective. There's a genetic flaw. I mean, all kinds of things you can read. If you read the British tabloid press, they are, of course, much more extreme in their disdain and it's racist as well at bottom. Now, further, and this is interesting and important, you know, I'm also trained as a historian, but I understand that the training of a historian is very useful for a journalist. In other words, to periodize the history of a place like North Korea. You know, in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s, under pressure from the Chinese government, the North Koreans had started to liberalize the economy. And in fact, began to make an overture to the west. At which point, and by the way, this is the same thing the Iranians were doing, making an overture to the west. There was a big reform movement. You know, they seemed very close to victory. They wanted to liberalize the economy. You know, don't mistake these governments for leftist governments that have some antipathy to neoliberal policies or liberalization. They are quite happy to start liberalizing. And they tried to do whatever they were doing in between 1998 and 2002. But then the Americans, bizarrely, because of a kind of insensate, new conservative politics, attached Iraq, Iran and North Korea into a concept which was called the axis of evil. And the Americans said, that is George W. Bush, then President of the United States, said that these three countries are not only the axis of evil, but it's the responsibility of the United States to knock out their regimes. And as if to make their concept vital come to life, they knocked out the government in Baghdad. Now, imagine if you are in Pyongyang, by the way, capital of North Korea, or in Tehran, capital of Iran. You are thinking, wait a minute, the Americans have placed us in this concept called the axis of evil. And we know it's not a joke. We know it's not a joke because they just took out Saddam Hussein's bath party in Iraq. They're going to train their guns on us next. So now, if you put this into the context, if you explain this to your viewers or your readers, they have a better sense of the stakes of why North Korea takes the position it takes. Now, I'm not saying all this to talk about North Korea. I'm talking about the state of the global media, remember. I began by saying the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said, listen, North Korea has a highly censored media, number two on the list, Eritrea number one. Nowhere on that list is the media of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, India. It doesn't exist on that list because they understand censorship in the narrowest possible way. In fact, in a way that's not useful. If the government is the main media, that's bad for them, it's a factor by itself, regardless of the content of the government media. If it's all privatized, that's good. That's somehow not censored. These are the kind of metrics they use. But I want us to think not in terms of this metric, but in terms of ideological censorship. Because ideological censorship is the real problem in the world today. It's not necessarily that governments are controlling the narrative. Governments are controlling the narrative. But the question isn't them ham-handedly controlling the narrative. It's that the narrative now is dominating the way in which stories are written. It would be almost crazy for somebody, even in the Indian media, to write a story trying to explain how the North Koreans see the world. Even in the Indian media, it might be seen. In the Western media, it would be unthinkable. Because you would get accused then of being sort of sympathetic to the North Koreans. You try to explain and understand something that is tantamount to sympathy. Why? Because the ideological censorship has bifurcated the world in a kind of mannequian way. Black, white, good, evil. Democracy, terrorism. Those who are on the side of democracy, they can do no wrong. Those who are on the side of terrorism, we should not even try to understand what they are doing. But the cartoonish North Korean media is less dangerous than the cartoonish media of the imperialists. Why? Because the North Koreans are not actually going to bomb anybody. They're not producing a global narrative to go to war against anybody. But the imperialist media is producing a narrative where once you say that the government is just crazy, these people are crazy, these people are themselves terrorists. There's no space for dialogue and negotiation. I mean, the test case for this is Libya. So let's turn to Libya. Because I think to understand the global media, you know, I could have spent 10, 15 minutes on media consolidation. You know, Axel Springer in Europe, German media companies, Bustleman. I have spent so much time talking about news core coming out of Australia dominating. I mean, this stuff people generally know. You know, we could talk about Facebook, YouTube, the censorship that is occurring behind the scenes. Palestinian rights post-disappearing miraculously. Okay, corporate consolidation, narrowness. We'll come back to that maybe. I'm actually interested in this other side of it, which is the ideological problem. Where there's a kind of ideological preparation. There's an ideological homogeneity that's beginning to take hold in the global media. There's an ideological homogeneity that's killing off the ability to think from other people's viewpoint. You know, what is it to be human? It's to empathize with other people's viewpoint. How can you have diplomacy without empathy? When people meet, when diplomats meet to negotiate a conflict, they have to be able to see the conflict from the eyes of the other party. Otherwise, there's no way they can negotiate. They have to see that the other party has legitimate grievances. If they don't think they have grievances, and if they are much more powerful than the other people, they'll just bomb them. Let's look at Libya. Now, you see, the Libya story is interesting because that is the NATO war in 2011. The Libya story is really quite interesting to me because this was a war that was produced by the media, by the imperialist media, the global media, the western media. How did they produce this war? I remember being at the United Nations interviewing people, asking them, this is in late February of 2011, asking them simple questions like, how do you know what's going on in Libya? What is your basis of knowledge? The UN doesn't have a team there, there's nobody there. The opposition is based at the time in Benghazi. They are telephoning Bernard Henry Levy, you know, the so-called, or the French so-called intellectual, who was on the phone with the French so-called politician, Nicolas Sarkozy, and they were talking about how they should come and, you know, save the Libyans, etc. How was the office of Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General, able to make a determination of what's going on in Libya? What was the basis, the factual basis of their determination? Simple question, right? I mean, it's what people should ask. How do you know what happened? Recently, the Trump administration dropped the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan, on Nangahar, you know, in Fah-Eastern, South-Eastern Afghanistan, Nangahar province. The Washington Post immediately published a story in which they said that this bomb was dropped, this massive bomb. So many ISIS members were killed. There was no civilian casualties. Now, this was a story written by Robert Koster, a journalist. I'm coming back to Libya, but this is a good detour. Robert Koster, very good story, based on what? How did Robert Koster know that the bomb, which was dropped by the United States government, on that there was no dispute? The United States said we dropped a bomb. But how did Robert Koster know how many ISIS members had been killed, number one? And secondly, how did Robert Koster know that no civilians had been killed? These are elementary factual matters. How did he establish that? When the Washington Post was asked this question, they answered. They received the information from the Pentagon. In other words, the United States military, which had dropped this bomb, the Mother of All Bombs, in a press release, said that so many ISIS had been killed and they revised the number. They upwardly revised it. And no civilians had died. And the paper published this as a story. They didn't say in the story we got the facts from the Pentagon. They published this as a story. Now, that to me is in the realm of basically censorship. That's state-driven stenography. That's not journalism. Journalists have to be able to confirm certain things. A young Afghan journalist, very smart person, stringer based in Kabul, got into a car and drove to Nangar. The area was closed to journalists. He was not allowed to enter there. He was told that it's an active combat zone. Interesting. You dropped this huge bomb. You claimed to have wiped out all of ISIS and now you say it's an active combat zone. He was not allowed in. So he went around the perimeter of this massive crater. It was an enormous crater, miles. And he interviewed villagers around there. And they told him the ground collapsed under their feet. They also told him that there were thousands of people living in that zone, in villages in that zone. So now he could walk away and based on his field intervention, he could say, well, I don't know how many ISIS were killed. It is clear that there were ISIS fighters there. Because in the previous summer, the Afghan National Army had engaged ISIS in that area. We know that that's true. But we do also know this was not a remote area and some hills. There were people living there, thousands of people. I cannot confirm the death rate. But I know that outside the crater, people felt the ground moved. Which means there must have been something inside the crater. We just don't know. Which means that the Washington Post story was censored. Because it was gifted to it by the US military. And the story didn't, again, in a sensible and sensitive way, question, ask the basic questions when the journalists wrote the story. Basic questions were not asked. Now, where is censorship? Remember this concept of ideological censorship? It's a very important theme for me. Because it's true. The United States government may not arrest journalists. It's true. There may be millions of journalistic outlets available, free in some way. Access to information is going to be difficult. And you begin to rely on the state to tell you what to write. And then there is this ideological censorship, where you begin to inhabit the narrative. Libya. How did the Secretary General know what was going on? Interestingly, the first time that they answered the question, they said it was from press reports. Now, that's interesting. The UN Secretary General, Secretariat, is making a determination about whether or not the Security Council, in other words, the Secretary General has to make a statement when a Security Council is debating whether to go to war against another member state. Their basis for understanding basic factual information on Libya was based on press reports. Very vague. So then what's the natural follow-up? Which press? Whose press reports are you looking at? And where is this press writing from? Well, it turned out that it was the press of Saudi Arabia, which is a press news empire called Al-Arabiya. Now remember on the Committee for the Freedom of Press, Saudi Arabia was number three after North Korea. So we had Eritrea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia. Anyway, let's leave that aside. I've already said that that list is really quite limited in its utility, because that list is basically a very narrow definition of censorship, which I don't feel is useful any longer. I would like the Committee for the Protection of Journalists to take a broader view, look at ideological censorship, look at much broader questions, but obviously they're not going to. You took Saudi Arabia, its press, which is an entirely 100% government press, its reports of massive civilian casualties in Libya. And based on that, you allowed a discussion at the UN Security Council over whether the United Nations should authorize a military strike on Libya, based on press reports and then more concretely on Saudi Arabia's press, Al-Arabiya. Now it turned out that Saudi Arabia actually had an interest in attacking and destroying Libya. Now, this is another question. We don't have time to get into it. The king, then king of Saudi Arabia hated Gaddafi. You know, again, we are reasonable, thoughtful people. We always think there's more involved in it than merely that kings hate people and so on. But in the case of Bonaki's, they can make policy based on their personal opinions. Although there were other issues involved, but I'm not getting into that. What I'm interested in is that this was the standard, this ideologically censored media, was the standard for the way in which the world was now told about what was happening in Libya. After the war, when investigations were done based on those previous assessments of mass civilian casualties, it was found that the casualty rate was much lower. Secondly, it was found that casualty rates were mainly mailed. Now, it's an interesting idea when if you're a journalist, sensitive journalist looking at war, if you look at casualty rates, you know that civilian casualties are greater when the casualties are male and female in relative equivalence. That means bombardment is taking place in homes, is taking place in parks, in civilian areas. If it's largely only male, then it's, I think, should send a flag up and these may have been people who are fighting. They may have been combatants, or one way or the other. But they also found that numbers were much lower. Now, based on this, when various organizations approached NATO, which under whose auspices the war had taken place, and asked NATO, allow us to do an investigation. NATO refused. Peter Olson, the lawyer for NATO, said that it's not possible. And what he said is instructive. It comes to ideological censorship. What Peter Olson said is, it is not possible for NATO to deliberately kill civilians. Now, just remember this in line of how the media reports, say, from Syria or from other places in the world. When the West bombs, it bombs for a reason. Allah, Rabbi, has said civilians are being killed. So when it bombs, it bombs for a reason. When other countries go into conflict, and I'm not justifying their conflicts by saying so, I'm merely pointing out the so-called ideological double standards here. When other countries go into conflict, it's always for the wrong reason. They could not have a reason to enter conflict. The West is the only noble agent in the world. Secondly, if the West ever does kill civilians, it is accidental. When others kill civilians, it's deliberate. Olson said that the West, the NATO, could not and can never deliberately... We will never have a policy of deliberately targeting civilians. It's not possible. Therefore, we cannot be investigated. That was what the lawyer said. They refused the investigation. Imagine this. Why was this not on the front page of every single newspaper? That NATO, which had received the imprimatur of the 193, 194 member states of the United Nations, refused to be investigated by the UN, even though the UN mandate given to NATO said that after the war, you have to be investigated. Why didn't every single newspaper in 193, 94 countries put this on the front page? Why didn't the Times of India have this on the front page? In other words, India, which was, I think at that time, the president of the Security Council, participated in this decision-making process, and India has horrified that there is no after-action basic investigation. Nobody is silent because we all live under ideological censorship. All these media outlets, to some extent, believe that when the West bombs, if it kills, it kills accidentally. It kills civilians. It kills them accidentally. When the Eastern malevolent dictator attacks, they intend to kill civilians. This is a very old colonial idea. In the colonial logic, when the British conducted atrocities in India, they did it for pedagogical purposes. They wanted to teach Indians how to behave, etc. Like during the aftermath of 1857-58. It was pedagogical. Teach the Indians how to become modern. When the Indians acted, whether it's Black Hole of Calcutta or whatever, the slaughter of Lucknow, the slaughter of the English families, etc., it's monumentalized as the barbarism of the East. This is ideological censorship, and it lingers from colonial times to the present. Finally, very quickly, let's spend a minute, just a minute, on the current conflict in Venezuela and Brazil, very quickly. Just another example of ideological and, in this case, institutional censorship. It would be useful for humans around the planet to understand that in Brazil and in Venezuela, the media is entirely corporate. It's entirely in the hands of very few people. In Brazil, it's run by one big giant company called Globo. In Venezuela, 70% at least of the media is in private hands and secretly held. So it's not publicly declared who the owners are. In Venezuela, only 5% of the media is government. So now it's interesting. Let's say the government is conducting policies which the elite don't like. It's very likely the elite will mobilize the media as the opposition against those policies. That's an obvious thing. If you were in that class, you would do that. I'd expect you, I'd want you to do that. Otherwise, I'd be confused about my analysis of classes. How can the ruling class voluntarily accept expropriation of their land? They will mobilize their media against the policy. It's perfectly... If that is the case, the government's response is the media is our enemy. Now, this is delicious for the imperialist media. Because now they will say, look, these countries are censoring journalists. The context which vanishes is that the media in these societies are not actually free and fair. These are medias of the ruling class which do not want to abdicate their power and property to the new governments that have emerged. So in Brazil, it was very easy to color corruption and put it directly in the lap of the workers' party. And to blame Lula, for instance, for corruption and make it seem as if Lula had personally benefited from corruption, which was not the case. If there was any corruption, it was raising funds towards election campaigns, not for personal gain. The entire opposition was entirely need to shoulder deep in corruption, but the media spun it that they were clean, even though everybody in the public was confused by this media reporting. So here the context for a sensitive and sensible journalist is the context of how the story is coming out. What is happening in Venezuela? What happens when a middle class uprising starts to throw bombs in the city of Caracas? How is that reported? Now, crackdown on that protest is reported as state terrorism. But that bomb being thrown is democracy. It's the entire opposite of what it would be in another context, where the class alignment inside a country was reversed. In other words, if it was a right-wing government in power and left-wing protesters went on the street and threw a bomb, they would be the terrorists. And there the media would be democratic. But here it's reversed. The class reality in Venezuela is reversed. So now sensitive, sensible journalists have to understand the class reality in a society in order to really unravel the way stories come out. What basically am I trying to get at? I'm trying to get at a very simple issue. I'm trying to raise the question of ideological censorship. That censorship is not merely in the liberal way it's understood. There is this other thing we have to deal with which goes back to an old idea that in every age the ideas of the ruling class become the ideas of our time. Why do they become the ideas of our time? Because the ruling class generally controls the mechanism of dissemination of those ideas through schools and of course through the media. So when we think about the global media, think about censorship. But don't think about it in that narrow way, like the Committee for the Protection of Journalists. Think of it in this differently narrow way as the way in which ideas are themselves framed in such a compelling way that to think outside that narrative or that set of ideas is to appear foolish, out of touch, etc. Thank you very much.