The news that North American NBC television Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams has been suspended for fabricating and embellishing news stories, has offered a timely reminder, in this era of creeping amnesia, of the dependency of Caribbean states.
Objectively, as resource-poor countries, we have little to invest in independent news gathering, and so we rely on others for “world news”. Subjectively we suffer from the colonial condition of trusting too easily everything Anglo-American as virtuous, above reproach, right and always just.
The lesson for the Caribbean from the Brian Williams affair is that we should adopt a stance of permanent scepticism towards what is beamed and force-fed into our weak and sponge-like consciousness as “real news”.
Such vigilance becomes even more imperative in our reliance on North American news networks since the United States, though enjoying the status of a world power, has never attached to itself the sense of global cultural legitimacy which this status entails.
In contrast, the British, after over two centuries of global imperialist domination (and knowledge and association with other peoples), have cultivated for themselves a culture of global trustworthiness and reliability, which though still essentially imperialistic and self-serving in its intent, is far more sophisticated and less crude and infantile in its method.
Thus, whilst the BBC can feel confident in offering a genuine “world service”, the United States has never actively demonstrated an appreciation of the fact that the United States of America is not the world, despite its global reach.
This is why American news networks always appear content to rely on immature sounding “dumb blondes” and “airheads” as news anchors. While perhaps suited for domestic American consumption, they come across as no more than “entertainment news” types who cannot separate Hollywood from real life.
More troubling than the Hollywood-induced shallow sensationalism dominating American news, is the role played by both private and public media houses as propaganda arms of the United States political establishment.
It is not an accident that one of Brian Williams’ lies was his claim of being fired upon by Iraqi forces while covering the Gulf war from a helicopter. In a context where his country was at war, Williams no doubt felt himself compelled to his small patriotic bit “to support
the troops”.
Whatever the explanation, our cultural dependency has been thrown into sharp relief by the unmasking of an American news anchor upon whom thousands of Caribbean citizens rely for their current information.
There were very compelling reasons why our more progressive leaders in the 1970s warned us against cultural imperialism. Today, in this shallow age of globalisation where we assume that we are part of a single US-led global culture, we have lazily made ourselves dependent upon those who have never proven worthy of our trust.
Perhaps the Brian Williams fiasco will force us to re-examine our cultural naivety.
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs. Email tjoe2008@live.com.
