Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more
Arne Ruth
Nowadays, few people recall the fact that the fall of Hitler changed the press structure
of large parts of Europe at a stroke. In Germany, not a single paper
published today was in existence before the war. In many occupied
countries, there are still newspapers which were originally founded as
part of the resistance movement.
The toughest retribution
against the structures of occupation was in France. A total of 649
newspapers were confiscated. The Resistance's own underground papers
took over premises and machinery. Le Monde first made its
official appearance on Liberation Day. It moved into a building
occupied until then by one of the worst collaborationist newspapers.
It was de Gaulle who
settled the matter. He was anything but a socialist, but he had no
sympathy whatsoever for newspaper proprietors' rights. Anyone who had
played the game of the Germans would have to pay the price - their
shares became worthless. Albert Camus, himself a member of the
Resistance, graphically described the situation: "Journalism is the
only sphere in which the purge has been complete, as we have managed to
get the legal settlement to include a complete change of personnel. (.
..) France now has a press liberated from money. This is something we
have not seen for a hundred years."
In hindsight, Camus' perspective was a beautiful Utopia. Le Monde
is now fighting in a newspaper-weary market, forced to change its
original ownership concept where the staff were sole proprietors. Liberation, another left-leaning political project, is even worse off.
This
reflects the core of capitalism, where companies must grow or fall by
the wayside. Those that try to attain a balanced state risk stagnating
in the market. And part of that process is the growth of increasingly
complicated organizations in which growth itself becomes the principal
objective. The editorial concept on which a newspaper was originally
based becomes a secondary consideration.
I have had reason to
reflect on this in relation to my own professional position. For
sixteen years, I was editor in chief at the liberal Dagens Nyheter,
Sweden's largest quality daily with a circulation of around 380,000.
Nine years ago, I quit my job. The immediate cause was the fact that
the holding company of my paper, itself part of the largest media
conglomerate in Northern Europe, the Bonnier Group, was on the verge of buying the only competing nationally distributed quality daily in Sweden, the conservative Svenska Dagbladet. The deal was negotiated in secret for several weeks.
As
a member of the board of my newspaper, I was restricted by Swedish
company law from discussing the attempted take-over publicly while
negotiations were in progress. I fought it from the inside. Once it had
leaked into the public, I attacked it as a clear-cut case of monopolisation
and told my readers why I had chosen to resign. The deal collapsed
within three days. Looking back on it now, it might seem like an
idealist attempt to fight the inevitable. But I take some comfort from
an observation - slightly ironic, yet flattering - made by the
legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski:
"In major press enterprise the idealistic journalists, those gentle
dreamers in pursuit of truth who once ran our newspapers, are now often
replaced by businessmen."
Control of the market means playing it
safe. The managerial business attitude affects journalism by trying to
limit risk-taking. Competition increasingly means everyone doing more
of the same. In Kapuscinski's words: "The world of the media has
exploded to such an extent that it has become like a self-sufficient
entity, living for itself... Teams of special correspondents sweep the
world. They move as a pack, in which each journalist keeps a close eye on what others are doing."
News,
which is now the main sales oriented journalistic field, is based on a
particular set of categories, emanating from a value system where
commercial, social, political, cultural and professional attitudes are
in constant interaction. The foundation of any news operation is a set
routine for the coverage of political, social and economic
institutions. The choice of perspective starts with a definition of a
sales-oriented territorial basis which tends to be either local,
regional or national but hardly ever international.
In
commercial terms, human interest is a crucial aspect of news
journalism. A classic definition was made in 1860 by a legendary
American journalist, Horace Greeley,
in a letter of advice to local editors: "Begin with a clear conception
that the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is
himself; next to that, he is most concerned about his neighbour. Asia
and the Tonga Islands
stand a long way after these in his regard... Do not let a new church
be organized, or new members be added to one already existing, a farm
be sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor
anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the fact
duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer cuts a
big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and unexceptionally as possible."
Television
has made Greeley's concept relevant on higher levels than local
journalism. National celebrities are the counterparts of Greeley's
village personalities. The mechanism is similar: by naming names,
journalism defines the symbolic characters of both national and local
belonging.
The logic of this mechanism makes foreign affairs
reporting unattractive. And Greeley's concept is still prevalent in
United States, where, with the exception of New York, Washington, Los
Angeles and a few more cities, there is still very little coverage not
only of the Tonga Islands but of Asia in general. This fact no doubt
increased the horror element in the September 11 mass killings on
American territory.
But, in contrast to large parts of Europe,
American journalism has an element which to some extent counteracts
provincial attitudes. Greeley's emphasis on human interest can be
applied to today's minorities. The fact that American media in general
have covered Northern Ireland extensively has a material basis: the
large number of Irish Americans.
Swedish are still largely stuck
in a tradition of homogeneity. The fact that more than a hundred
thousand Swedes have an ex-Yugoslav background and seventy thousand
emanate from Iran has very little influence on the definition of
foreign coverage. A still valid analysis of the epistemology of news
journalism was made by the legendary American political commentator Walter Lippman
in 1922. Anyone who has been working in a news medium will recognise
his description of the mode of operation. All news gathering is based
on a daily coverage of central institutions and personalities involved
in their activities.
A concept of social rules is a core element in determining news values. Crime of all sorts is a prime category, where the status and celebrity
of those accused are central elements. Political power holders accused
of breaking rules are solid front page news. Lippman compares the
premises with the journalistic conventions used in covering a baseball game. The journalist takes for granted that his or her readers will know the essential rules.
But,
asks Lippman, what if the rules are suddenly and drastically changed?
Until the new conditions have become common knowledge, any journalist
who wants to convey the facts of the game will have to refer to the new
conditions as an integral part of the story. Lippman draws the
following conclusion of his metaphor:
"The more you try to
imagine the logic of so absurd a predicament, the more clear it becomes
that, for the purposes of news gathering, it is impossible to do much
without an apparatus and rules for naming, scoring, recording. (...)
Whenever there is a good machinery of record, the modern news service
works with great precision. (...) The events which are not scored are
reported either as personal or conventional opinion, or they are not
news."
In Lippman's perspective neglected aspects of
journalistic coverage will only come to the fore when, in his words,
"somebody protests, or somebody investigates, or somebody publicly, in
the epistemological meaning of the word, makes an issue out of them."
His
metaphor of the changed rules for the baseball game can be applied to
the process of European integration. Rules have changed, and so has
social behaviour. But with the exception of media for business and
intellectual elites - most of them American-onwed - and sports and
entertainment television, major structures in European publishing and
broadcasting are still largely framed by languages and national
borders. The basic journalistic division between domestic and foreign
news serves to consolidate psychological distances. Hence, the
political discourse on common problems in Europe is still enacted
primarily at national level.
To the extent that opinions
are influenced by the media, they take shape largely within that
framework. Without cross-border interaction, stances taken at the
national level tend to remain limited in perspective, thereby
reinforcing Euro-scepticism.
From the perspective of European
integration, the problem seems to be that national media are both
reflecting and strengthening particularities, with journalists rarely
acknowledging insular tendencies in the value system on which they base their coverage.
I'll
give an example from Scandinavia. Denmark and Sweden, sometimes
regarded as twins in terms of values, have opposite tendencies not only
in relation to alcohol, but also in two other symbolic fields: sexual
services and immigrant rights.
Malmö and Copenhagen are linked
by a bridge across the Öresund. On the Swedish side, using the services
of a prostitute or earning money as a pimp is a criminal act. In contrast, the largest Copenhagen tabloid, Extrabladet,
every day brings several pages offering sexual services. In this field,
Denmark is liberal. But it's more legally restrictive than Sweden in
relation to immigrants. Danish citizens who want to marry a non-Dane
under the age of 24 increasingly leave for Sweden, where the age limit
is set at 18 regardless of nationality. The national differences in
attitude rarely confront each other.
Hence, a general aspect of
European values is true of Scandinavia as well: what is a firebrand
issue in one country is a minor matter in another. Political
discussions rarely take place across national borders. National movers
in debate and polemics are little known even in neighbouring countries.
And languages shared across borders do not substantially break this
tendency. Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland are separate realms, as are England and Ireland, France and Walloon Belgium, and Sweden and Swedish-speakers in Finland.
Political commentators who are read and discussed all over Europe tend to be American, such as Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama.
Hence, European integration is blocked when it comes to effective
cross-border communication. But in terms of influence on people's
lives, it is certainly institutional and ideological as well as
economic.
Member-states are now enmeshed in a
politico-administrative system where ministers are also European
decision-makers, national bureaucrats executers of EU decisions, and
interest groups actors in a lobby system centred on Brussels. Both
public and private actors are already partners in a multi-level
European governance system where a fluid system of networking is a
crucial element.
The result: EU institutions have enhanced their
influence in relation to national government, including new, direct
links from Brussels to sub-national authorities and a reduction in
parliamentary power. Nation-states are still very much present. But
they are increasingly becoming nodes in a network of national,
regional, local and international political institutions. Externalities increasingly
govern national politics, while politicians rarely acknowledge this
openly, except by blaming unpopular decisions on Brussels. They tend to
call for national solutions when such are no longer possible, and on
other occasions demand European solutions to problems they are
unwilling to face at home. It's no wonder that such a system breeds
populist tendencies of all sorts. Present-day Europe does have a number
of dynamic new networks: among them the Committee of Regions, an
advisory body to the EU Commission. Growing Pan-European bodies exist
among business and labour organisations, artists' associations and,
last but not least, foundations.
Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan
has summarized the paradoxes in the European realm in these words: "In
the absence of a single European public space, there are myriads of European niches,
each providing a distinct meeting place to participants from all
member-nations who have shared interests... The more circumscribed the
agenda, the more smoothly the all-European exchange proceeds: experts,
technicians, specialists have no trouble finding each other, nor do
entrepreneurs from the same branch, believers from the same church,
athletes from he same sport or scientists from the same discipline find
it hard to congregate and communicate. But these multifarious niches,
neatly separated as they are, do not add up to a European space.
On the contrary, as the agenda widens and comes to encompass broader
cultural, social and political issues, communication becomes that more
difficult. There are literally hundreds of specialized journals that
carry the epithet European or an equivalent in their title. But when it
comes to general cultural and political reviews, there may be no more
than a dozen that achieve a genuine European distribution, and almost
all of these are in English."
An effective mechanism of making
issues out of important subjects which are neglected at the national
level is to have them prominently covered by media in other countries,
a process which affects national pride.
I
have a personal experience of this. In 1997, my newspaper made an
investigation based on academic research which, until then, had
attracted very little attention. The story had a strong element of
human interest. It dealt with the consequences of a policy of forced sterilization
which had affected some 60,000 Swedes, most of them impoverished,
between the mid-thirties and the mid-seventies, when the practice was
ended by a parliamentary decision. It took a week after our
journalistic coverage had started until it became a real issue in
Sweden, eventually turning into a top-level political controversy where
the government was forced to institute a system of compensation for
people who had been sterilized. The week-long delay was the time needed
for media around the world to discover the story and send crowds of reporters
to Stockholm to cover it. The enormous international interest forced
the issue into prominence at home base. In the annual report of the
Swedish Foreign Office on foreign coverage of Sweden for that year, the
sterilization controversy represented two thirds of everything
published around the world.
A similar case where foreign
attention makes an issue out of a neglected subject occurred in Norway
in the mid-nineties. Fifty years after the end of the German
occupation, Norwegian journalists once more varied the theme of
resistance and national liberation. One of them, Björn Westlie at the business daily Dagens Näringsliv,
published a very different tale. Based on extensive research in
Norwegian archives, he told the story of what happened to the small
minority of Norwegian Jews, most of whom were arrested by Norwegian
police and deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Their belongings were
confiscated by a newly instituted official authority and sold at public
auctions, where buyers were in full knowledge of the origin of the
items. The small number of survivors were given only nominal
compensation after liberation. Most of the officials involved in
confiscation were never punished.
Very little attention was paid
to Westlie's articles. But seven months later, a report written by
Westlie for the World Jewish Congress in New York was published and
immediately covered by Reuters news agency. And then all hell broke out
for the Norwegian government. Within weeks, it was forced to set up an
official investigatory commission. Eventually, the Norwegian parliament
decided to pay generous compensation to Jewish survivors and the Jewish
Congregation.
In both these cases, cross-border journalism helped
democracy at the national level. And in general terms, if major
decisions are taken at a European level, without political debate
taking place across borders and on a European scale, democracy has very
little chance of working. In Abram de Swaans words: "A European public
space will in the end turn out to be a necessary condition for the
survival of national democracies. This requires European journals and
newspapers, European cultural meeting points and intellectual
networks."
It is a fair assumption that democracy will face
increasing problems in individual member countries without public
debate taking place at all levels of the European community. A
cross-border policy should embrace all these varieties and aim at
increasing the level of interaction.
Continued support for the
European project requires adaptation of national institutions to the
European governance system and an open discourse where issues related
to change are confronted and discussed both at the national level and
in cross-border dialogue, before being implemented in Brussels.
Broad-based discussion including critical stances are necessary in
order to clarify the issues and modify positions of power elites.
There
are some encouraging tendencies. Electronics enables journalists,
writers, artists and musicians to reach an audience without
intermediaries. As a field of communication, it can disrupt the power
of the media giants to control distribution. The electronic revolution
can be a liberating force. It can complete a process that began with
the arrival of the printing press, giving each and everyone the right
and means to present their ideas and obtain information.
Increasingly, websites
with news, debates and opinions - either individually tailored or
structured in relation to activist issues - successfully stage
discussions across borders. They carry information in more than one
language and present contributions from several countries.
Such
cross-border ventures are eased by the fact that European students
increasingly study abroad. The plurality of such efforts means
fragmentation but also, potentially, creative interaction. This variety
of opinion-building, however, is by definition a solicited one. For the
older generation, as well as a vast group of people of all ages, the
main source of information remains the traditional media.
A truly European discussion would still mean a multiplicity of views and
arguments. Voices from all member states would agree to disagree, but
also to interact on matters of common interest regardless of borders. A
European public sphere should be conceived in terms of partially
overlapping public spheres where local, regional and national loyalties
and political tendencies are encouraged to establish positions in
relation to allies and opponents in other parts of Europe. Civil
society is a crucial aspect of this process. It seems to me that
foundations, which are allowed to use their resources for other
purposes than making profit, could play a crucial role in helping new
journalistic initiatives in the building of such a sphere.
*
Arne Ruth
was born in 1943 in Gollnow. He is founding chairman of the Swedish
Rushdie Committee. In 1977 he became cultural editor at the daily
newspaper Expressen and was editor in chief and cultural editor of Dagens Nyheter, the leading liberal Swedish daily,
from 1982 to 1998. Ruth has published works on Nazi aesthetics,
European culture and politics, and international human rights. He has
been a visiting professor in Sweden, Norway and the USA, and has won
several European prizes for his journalistic work.