Ideas - Non-Aligned News: The Future of Non-Western Media, Part Two

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

In part two of our series about the 1970s journalistic experiment known as the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, IDEAS turns to journalists who continue to grapple with the challenges that were first highlighted more than five decades ago. Their concerns and critiques about representation and fairness at the heart of those conversations persist in newsrooms today. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

For Bangladesh, it's a source of gratification to be able to take its place by the side of forces of peace and progress. In September 1973, Algiers hosted the fourth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. There were delegations from 76 countries, including the newest members, Argentina, Oman, and Bangladesh. These non-aligned, or third-world, nations were newly free from the yoke of colonialism. A key project for their new future was to replace colonial narratives about their societies with their own understanding of themselves. That meant journalism and analysis from a third-world perspective. We were always thinking that the importance of democratizing information was to have the means, the technical means, etc., to have the opportunity to give a voice to those who wouldn't have the chance to be heard. wouldn't have the chance to be heard.

Jump ahead five decades, and the questions that dog journalists and scholars in those early days endure. What does it mean to give voice to marginalized perspectives? Is the pursuit of objectivity a valuable goal? And does journalism have a role in the pursuit of liberation? In part two of our look at the non-aligned news agency's pool and its legacy, Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa turns to conversations with journalists who continue to grapple with these questions. She begins with journalist and historian Beatriz Bissio,

who looks back on her own early effort to tell the stories of the third world. I am Beatriz Bissio, originally from Uruguay, nowadays for a long time in Brazil. At the present moment, I am associate professor at the political science department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I'm at the present also vice director of the Institute of of Rio de Janeiro. I'm at the present also vice director of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Science and also a professor at the postdoctoral program in history.

And I was former in my prehistoric life, a journalist editing and directing some magazines, but in particular one, which is, I think, of the interest of this meeting, which was called Third World and lasted over 33 years in very difficult environment. 33 years in a very difficult environment. Beatriz Biccio helped found Third World Magazine, or Tercero Mundo, in Buenos Aires in 1974. In the three decades it was being published, she interviewed a long list of anti-colonial luminaries, including Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro, Mahmoud Darwish, and Hugo Chavez. Tercero Mundo was born out of two of the most upending forces, politics and love. So international journalism was really a consequence of the coup d'etat in Uruguay. I met the one who was my husband later on.

And he was a politician and journalist well-known in Brazil, but actually in exile in Uruguay. Beatriz is referring to Neva Moreira. In 1973, there was a coup in Uruguay, and that sent Neva fleeing again. He ended up in Algiers, where he wrote about the Fourth Summit of the Non-Aligned Nations. He was in a mission of journalism, but a mission of no return, of course. He went there, and that was the beginning of the story. So we started after he returned in very important connections there. It wasn't his first visit to Africa. He has a long history of international journalism before becoming an exiled journalist.

before becoming an exiled journalist. It started the publication. Are we willing to contribute to democratize information as journalists? Well, that's a challenge and we are going to take it. Tercero Mundo's focus was on the story of post-colonial liberation. What did it mean to fight for independence? What were the obligations of a free people? The magazine's focus meant that its journalists often found themselves on the opposite side of the state.

It meant Tercero Mundo would become, as Beatriz calls it, a nomad project. We were always thinking that the importance of democratizing information was to have the means, the financial means, the technical means, etc., to have the opportunity to give a voice to those who wouldn't have the chance to be heard, but not to be, let's say, controlled by the state. So in this sense, we always defended the idea of public information. We paid a very high price for our independence. If you look for the collection of our magazine, you will see that in some periods from one edition to the other, it took perhaps six months or three months because it theoretically was a monthly magazine. to have it monthly. For instance, since the first step in Buenos Aires

when it was launched in September 1974, and the second part of the project that was from Mexico because of long history of exile in Peru, it was almost two years. And then we transferred the project to Rio. So it was a nomad proposal, a nomad project, because it was on our shoulders. It depends on our personal life. And it was very difficult sometimes to take decisions.

For instance, in Mexico, we have what I call the golden era of the magazine because the government was supportive in the sense of giving us the possibility to be free. That wasn't in Argentina. So that was very important. It was a melting point of the exile of all Latin America by the time in Mexico. So we have a lot of possibility of covering El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, South America.

Basically, we were always looking for our own countries, how to manage to inform about what was going on, terror, torture, etc. We pay a high price with colleagues who are missing till now. But the idea was that we have this as a mission, and it was a personal mission, I think. So, I think that's the only way to explain why it was so lasting, because there was a group that was very conscious about that as an important mission, I think because of the political moment in South America in particular. So part of this commitment was the commitment to support the movements that were inside Uruguay, inside Argentina, inside Chile, inside Brazil mainly, struggling for democratization.

It was also wider than that because we covered Africa, Asia, etc. But as Latin Americans, one of the main reasons to try to continue was that. And may I say that I feel nowadays very proud when I hear in Brazil where the magazine started to be read even before having a Portuguese edition because people carried it with the baggage even when it was very dangerous,

from the frontiers, etc. And I have nowadays many testimonies that diplomats, colleagues of mine, our rector in my university, who told, I read Tercer Mundo, and it's because of that that I am here. So for me, that is enough. At its height, Tercero Mundo published in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, distributing 120,000 copies in 67 countries.

It stopped publication in 2006, but for Beatriz, now working as an academic, the work of informing and connecting the third world, what we now call the Global South, continues, even though the magazine is no longer alive. I think when the audience have the possibility to join A with B with C, possibility to join A with B with C, they feel very happy. The ability of connecting things, and that means, of course, going through history and going to the complexity of history and of the present moment, yeah. And I think that I have a personal experience because in our university we have the mandatory obligation of having what we call extension, that is to give to the society part of our work. It depends on your project.

There are different forms. One of the forms my center decided to have was each Thursday night, two hours, by YouTube, we recorded with different professors. And so it was an overview of the 20th century, from history, from culture, etc. Very, very interesting experience. And after the course was finished, I received a message by one of our audience, a woman in the rural part of Brazil,

but with some kind of course of experience because the letter said, the message said, after that experience of having this discipline and attending these classes, I feel that I am out of Plato's cave. These young generations without any idea of their future, frustrated. It has to do with the lack of a comprehensive way of understanding where they are. And so I think we should think on that as a way to preserve our future. It's not only about communication. It's much more than that. As a way to preserve our future, it's not only about communication. It's much more than that.

It's not only about communication. It's much more than that. Beatriz's observation is evergreen and lives on. It remains a key point of discussion for anyone whose stock in trade is information sharing. That includes scholars and journalists. The first English-language version of Tercero Mundo was published in 1979. It opened with a passage addressing the reader. In it, the magazine laid out its mission, which was to counter what it called the manipulation of information by international news agencies.

I think one of the key motives of Terce Mundo, the third world magazine, was to try and calibrate or at least change kind of an existing relationship that various people, but in this case, non-white people, BIPOC people, had with media. And that relationship, the way that I understand it, was really structured by this kind of inequality of ignorance. Mola Bell is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan and the project director of the Non-Aligned News Research Partnership, a project that studies the now-defunct non-aligned news agency pool. People in Ghana, for instance, would pick up newspapers. And if they wanted to read about Ghana,

they often, if they were reading in a Ghanaian newspaper, it was written by a non-Ghanaian or a Western. That generated complicated experiences as kind of consumers or receivers or people that engage with information, but yet they had ample information about what was going on in New York or what was going on in Paris, right? And so in that sense, this is what I'm referring to as kind of a recalibration. And when I think upon reflection and upon experience after experience after experience, because this was, in fact, a historical common experience amongst various different kinds of communities, but they shared this kind of experience, generally speaking. but they shared this kind of experience, generally speaking. They quickly, I think, on an intellectual level and a practical level, came to understand that what shaped this inequality of ignorance was racism.

So there was this inequality in a sense where everyone, quote unquote, I'm generalizing here, knew about what was happening in New York, but nobody knew what was happening in Rio. Or if they did, it was very know, a motive deep in the gut of Terce Mundo and trying to not overhaul the system, but start chipping away and trying to change this relationship of deep inequality was at the heart of INWICO, the New World Information and Communication Order, a term first coined during the UNESCO debates about media representations of the Global South in the 1970s and 1980s. Christopher J. Lee has held academic appointments in Asia, Africa, and North America. He's also the lead editor of Safundi, a quarterly journal of history, literature, politics, and ideas centering on Southern Africa. I think Nuiko is basically an attempt to correct or rebalance the media landscape

in the world during the 1970s and basically try to, uh, better account for, uh, journalists, newspapers, media outlets in the emergent third world and, and, uh, you know, formalize, provide a more formal structure and, and, uh, um, way of, of creating space for those voices in such a way that would counter the legacies of, of imperialism, racism, and so forth. So, um, I simply, you know, recap that to, in a sense, underscore the point that, you know, during the 1970s, um, in some ways it was simpler times. Um, the media landscape was, uh, you know, consisting of television, radio, newsprint. And today, I think it's much more diverse in terms of the platforms at play. So, you know, not only we have, you know, radio, newsprint, television, but we have Twitter, all sorts of online platforms.

We have TikTok. platforms. We have TikTok. We have all sorts of means of communicating what's going on in places like Gaza or Sudan or South Africa. And so, I think that that isn't to say that, you know, inequalities don't still exist. I do think that, you know, a lot of the media today, whether it's, you know, the CBC or CNN or Jacobin, you know, these media outlets are publishing or um you know promoting material that that meets certain audience uh desires and needs and so by virtue of that um you know there there are uh what i want to say certain i hate to use the word bias because, you know, brings up this issue of objectivity and distortion and so forth, but certainly to say that, you know, you know, these different media outlets are trying to reach certain audiences. And by virtue of that, that creates, you know, differences of perception, differences of reporting, which in turn can reinforce, um, you know, again, the kind of imbalances and, and, and discrepancies and discrepancies and even discriminations that Mo is identifying. agree with the ambitions of NUICO in the sense of, you know, trying to create a more holistic

and balanced and, um, fair, uh, media environment, uh, uh, a stronger and more robust, uh, global public sphere. But I will say too, that, you know, today, again, for the reasons I stated, um, with, you know, the abundance of platforms, that that's also created a new set of complications that makes the Nuico moment, you know, somewhat, you know, somewhat quaint and, you know, part of the past. Not to say that it's unimportant now, but simply that things have changed. Pasent, do you want to pick up on what Chris was saying? Well, I just, I'm thinking of like my own experience in media and so much I think of

why so many of us come into media who are not born here from our, or from, you know, predominantly Western countries. I feel like we've kind of individualized what Nuiko is doing. Pasent Matar is an independent writer, producer, and broadcaster. I was born in Egypt in Alexandria. I'm Muslim. I grew up between Saudi Arabia and Dubai in Egypt. And I was just thinking, like, you know, when you come to the West and see how places like Egypt and Muslim countries are represented, it's just like, you can see it's so stark that there's so much that's missing. And so I think so much of what's driven me and so many others, so many journalists, so many racialized journalists come into this institution, the media

institution, from a place of pushing back, of responding to of of not being aligned with what we're seeing and i'll just speak for myself it was like a personal mission to say there's so much more here and there's also so much more to us we're not here just like i think that's something that i think about a lot too like i always wonder what would what would so many of us be doing if we weren't in this industry to push back on, to respond to, to react to. So I say this all to say that although NUICO was in the 70s, I feel like so many of us in some of these legacy institutions, or that began in legacy institutions because that was just the way to make it into journalism. or that began in legacy institutions because that was just the way to make it into journalism. Whether we liked it or not, it was just always from a place of pushing back, of challenging, of correcting. And it gets tiresome after a while. And I was at CBC for a decade. I was there for 10 years. I mean, that's a very long time to be somewhere. It was a very complex experience, but for the most part, you just, you know, you're putting your shoulder up against it every single day and you're dependent on, you're dependent on to do that, but then you're challenged when you try to do that.

of what NUICO was established to do has now fallen on perhaps an individual, it's fallen onto an individual level. But I will say that in this moment that we're in now, I really do feel like we are, there's this non-aligned movement that's happening now. And it's not necessarily new, but I would say, especially since October,

2023, I think it's just been such a stark moment of seeing perhaps the limits of traditional media. And so many of us are kind of banding together to do some of that non-aligned work in an ad hoc, individual way. And I think it's a different playing field now. I don't know what it looks like exactly, but it does feel like there is more of an understanding and perhaps more momentum behind this non-aligned news movement. And I think many people get it now in a way that they may not have gotten it pre-October. How's it going?

I relate to everything you just said, Pasinth, because that battle that you you know, the battle that you have to face every day. I'm just thinking there's so many things that everybody said that I'm trying to pull out. For me, I'm a child of colonialism. My parents are South Asian. They grew up in South Asia. My grandfather was a journalist during the Quit India movement. So I grew up very much understanding how much media and journalism frames the way that we think about each other, about the world, how much, you know, journalism impacts how we resist as people against those colonialist projects. Vanita Srivastava is a senior editor at The Conversation,

as well as the host and producer of the podcast Don't Call Me Resilient. I worked during 9-11 at the New York Times, so I'm very aware of how mainstream media impacts and frames issues. I'm very grateful to be where I am right now, which is in Toronto, Canada, and at a media organization where I no longer have to do that daily battle in and out for the issues that I, you know, that I used to battle in mainstream news organizations. So I get to, you know, present media and the issues through a critical race lens every week. And that's really, truly a privilege and an honor. And so that's kind of how I think about my work now. Instead of approaching it as a battle,

I do approach it more as a privilege to be able to present news in this way. I know it's in a smaller arena than the New York Times, but at least I'm not doing the battle anymore. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. The debates that fuel discussions about the New World Information and Communication Order, NWICO, are alive and well today. The frustration about the imbalance between who gets to talk and who is talked about can be seen between the global north and south and also within the regions themselves.

It can often look like expertise pitted against lived experience. When the two compete, the ordinary person may count for less. What I found in journalism is that the more you depend on the people with the lived experience, the more scrutiny than you are faced with by bringing those experiences forward. And suddenly, we have to fact check every line of what they've said. But someone who's an armchair expert or a pundit, they're assigned more credibility. I think it goes without saying that it's not that only live people with lived experience have the truth and people who have fancy titles at big institutions don't. But I just think in the making of knowledge, in the making of the record, it is skewed, and especially in,

again, these institutions. We return now to a conversation with journalists and academics about communication, representation, and whose voice is provided a platform. What you're identifying is one of the central dynamics, I would argue, of historical research. So in the sense of taking evidence, what does the evidence say? How do we construct that evidence into a narrative? And then what is the purpose of that narrative? Does it reinforce a status quo? Does it work against a status quo? And so there's a litany of questions

that follow the point that you're raising. I think it also points to the common ground. And again, to circle back to what I was saying earlier, for me, the affinities between historical scholarship and, say, journalism and how they interact together for me within my writing. I will say that, you know, because it's a dynamic, it's constantly changing. And it depends on the story. It depends on the evidence at hand. You know, there's some events, stories where there's just an abundance of information and you have to navigate through all of it. narrowed down very quickly to a particular point or a particular perspective in order to

arrive at a piece that's 4,000 words, 8,000 words, or if it's a book, 90,000 words. On the other hand, there are events where there's very little information. Either that information is classified, either people might not want to talk about it. You know, there might be a government perspective where there's a very bureaucratic language about what happened. And then because of the sensitivity of the events, you know, people might not want to talk because it puts them at risk in some way. So, you know, there, there are all sorts of situations like that. I think, I think what drives me, I mean, I, you know, not to, um, make light of that, but that's also part of the, the real, um, appeal of doing certain stories is that, you know, there isn't a lot of information

or there's an abundance of information and we have to navigate it. So to me, that's what's intellectually stimulating, to try to arrive at some kind of analysis that helps the reader understand something. And building upon what was said previously and to add to this, I think what really drives me both as a reader, well, as a reader, as a scholar, as, you know, as a freelancer, I'm really, you know, just ultimately interested in stories that haven't been told or haven't been told well, or maybe there's, you know's another angle that hasn't been accounted for.

And so I think about that a lot. When I encounter something that I don't understand, that's even better. Because for me, writing isn't just about saying, okay, I know this, I'm an expert, let me tell everyone about my expertise. That's not very interesting to me. What's more interesting for me is to encounter something that I don't personally understand or might not understand completely, and that drives me into a position of what can I learn, either through preexisting accounts,

through archival documents, through talking to people, ideally all of the above. I would say an important moment for me or or an important shift in my thinking and for me when i say thinking i mean being because they're the same, is when I embrace the fact, and I see this as a fact, that all storytelling is political. And so that leads me to then think about what are my politics? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of relationship do I want to have with other people? What kind of relationship do I want to have with information?

Which is arguably my main way of communicating with people that I don't know and that I can't see and that I can't touch. May I take us down to just a little pessimistic path for a minute? Because we have been talking a lot about how things have changed since the seventies and also since October 23, and perhaps since May, 2020 after George Floyd was murdered on the streets in the U S. after George Floyd was murdered on the streets in the U.S.

And I often feel like the power is very much still resting in the same place. So for me, as a, you know, practicing journalist, just like yourself, Nahid, it's just the frustration, sometimes the helplessness is there on a daily basis. When you look at these gigantic power structures, which have to do with economics, which have to do with who still holds the power in our media organizations, in our academies as well, as a former academic, I can say for sure 100% that where you get published, where you are allowed to publish, who accepts your article is very much about who is in charge of doing that peer review, who is in charge of deciding who gets to be at that conference, who is in charge of accepting that pitch. Okay. And also if we put an article out, by the way, about Gaza, like we did, you know, have been doing every day or every week since October, we get 150 to 200 to 300 negative comments, negative letters that are impacting not just the editors like mental health, but also the people who write that story who are then targeted

and have to deal with that every day. So yes, power might be slowly, slowly changing. I don't know. I just, that's why I'm talking about the pessimism. I actually don't know. Sometimes I feel like it's going the complete other way. So we had this like wonderful moment and I'm going to call it a wonderful moment that came out of tragedy, which is post 2020, that we thought, yeah, we should be aware as institutions of systemic racism, of institutionalized racism, we're going to make some kind of change. They were on the surface. Did they make a difference? I don't know because I'm not doing that research, so I can't tell you. I'm not sure if they made a difference.

Is there a backlash to that? Maybe. That's kind of what I feel personally. Anecdotally, I can tell you that I feel that personally. Anecdotally, I can tell you that in October 2023 2023 when it was time to publish or put out a story about why it's so hard to talk about Israel's Israel and Gaza together in our North American society first of all we had to talk to 50 people before two people agreed to have the conversation in public, in a space. And then second of all, I had to call like, you know, the presidents of universities, et cetera, to get permission to publish this piece because

academics were telling me that their presidents were telling them that they were not allowed to speak about this issue. So people are making real personal sacrifices to do that kind of speaking out. So that to me means the institutional support is not there. my like little pessimism mode for a minute because I do feel there's a certain, I do feel helpless a lot and I do feel powerless a lot. I'm in a really privileged position. There's many privileges that I have. I can, you know, outline them as a South Asian woman in, you know, in Canada, in the West, in the position that I have actually being able to put out media that comes from an intersectional lens that's in itself a privilege but but we're operating within power structures that I do not feel have changed and I do feel have actually

slid backwards can I jump in yeah I I completely completely agree with what you've just said. I mean, having the intelligence and foresight to commit myself to two very problematic professional spaces, that is say academia, but then also tentatively journalism. It's clear that these are professional spaces that have long-term legacies and so forth of gender bias, racial bias, or in the broader context of the world, colonial legacies and so forth. I will say though that I am, and again, this is anecdotal and with the media outlets I've been involved with like Africa's Country and Jacobin. I mean, there are journalists and editors who are very committed to reforming that. And let me just speak to the American context. Many Americans may not have heard of Jacobin, for example, or Africa's country. I'm not claiming these are major media outlets, but simply to say that there are, and it could be a generational

issue, younger and younger than me, editors and journalists who are really committed to a kind of political reporting that works against some of these biases. So I agree with the pessimism, but I also am heartened by the kind of journalism that I've read that's trying to get beyond, again, narratives that we find in places like the New York Times or even places like the New Yorker or London Review Books, these elite publications that despite their eliteness, nonetheless, entrench certain narratives in different ways. And so, I don't want to overstate that and say we live in some utopian moment. Of course, we don't. But I think that there are opportunities that certain smart editors and journalists are taking advantage of. I will say

too, just as a scholar, to circle back, I want to be clear just for the sake of listeners, I do think it's important to note that this moment of the 1970s in Nuiko, there are a number of important precursors prior to the 1970s, even during the colonial period. And here I'm thinking in South Africa where I've done a lot of work and lived for different periods of my life. Very important legacies of black journalists who were writing during the apartheid period. I'm thinking in particular of Drum Magazine that produced writers like Esquiem, Pilele, Lewis and Cossi, Bloch-Modisane, just incredible writing, important work that was happening decades you know, decades before, you know, UNESCO stepped in and tried to, you know, create a global, you know,

media public sphere that was more equitable. So. It drives them out of newsrooms, but it also drives them out of journalism schools. but it also drives them out of journalism schools. So as a former journalism prof, I can tell you how many students of color who just said, I give up. Because if it's like this in the journalism school, imagine what it's going to be like when I get there. Because there's so much power and bias against me, against even what I'm saying.

We lose them in journalism schools. Then if you manage to get through to the end of the journalism school process, if you do that process, if you decide to go to journalism school and then get into the field, you then, you know, we do lose a lot of people. I often look around me, like I'm an older woman of color in the newsroom. me, like I'm an older woman of color in the newsroom. I'm like, where are my people? Because so many of us have decided that they can't do it. The pain of doing it, the struggle, the frustration, the grief, really the grief of doing it just drives you out. So I think for me, I've just, I'm, again, I'm in a really privileged position. I'm not battling that in my particular newsroom right now, although I did at the beginning. I won that battle to have

this kind of space that I have now. I, you know, I do cross-check everything that we put out. We fact-check. We use peer-reviewed articles. But again, there's the bias of peer review articles as well. So one can never be sure. I've just accepted the fact that people do not view me as objective. They just don't. And that's just something that I accept. But personally, if people ask me, what kind of journalism do you do? Well, I do, you know, fair, responsive journalism that looks at issues and looks at it intersectionally and looks at it factually. And I don't put out anything that's like an opinion. I put out what I think is a really good story. Well, that's also interesting that you just brought up opinion, because one of the things

that we've talked about so much is the proliferation of opinion right that opinion speculation um that that has uh you know supplanted fact-based journalism and a lot of that has to do with cost management right that it's much much cheaper to get someone to write an opinion-based essay than it is to assign somebody to an investigative story i'd be interested to hear historically mo how the ideas of objectivity and neutrality were taken up in the Enrico process. Was that a framing that existed in that discourse? I think all the things that the experiences and perspective that Pesant and Benita have shared,

definitely I can see them in Inuco in the 1970s. And to repeat a point that Chris made, you know, the 1970s was just one point of Enrico, right? And today and tomorrow are other points, you know, in this story. The truth in my, let me not say the truth. As far as I'm concerned, it's a historical fact that the question of objectivity in world news was racialized. So it was part of a process that created inequalities based on ideas of racial difference. based on ideas of racial difference. And therefore, kind of, whether it's consciously or subconsciously,

depending on how powerful they are. One of the ways this kind of, this emerges, and actually in the response to when UNESCO officially kind of made this declaration, calling for essentially a new world information and communications order in 1978. And the response was to invoke a racialized idea that is very powerful. It's actually very integral to decolonization.

And it is the idea of freedom. And particularly when it comes to something like freedom of speech. And so the response to the question of objectivity was to question, rightfully, where the information was coming from. And one of the arguments that was made was that, well, this initiative is being driven by third world dictators, which factually in many instances was the case.

There were authoritarian regimes in this part of the world, was the case. There were authoritarian regimes in this part of the world, but that was weaponized in a racial way to frame information and the question of objectivity as what source, to come back to kind of some of the kind of common parlance, right? What is a reliable source? Who can be included? And so that was pushback because essentially what we had was and ideas of freedom of speech, because they were kind of individualized to a certain extent, they couldn't be taken away.

And so what that idea, and I'm not saying I agree with this, but this was the line of argumentation, is that that kind of infringement upon someone's freedom was a form of totalitarianism, which was the opposite of democracy. Just to build on what Mo was saying though, within the historical profession, there was a book published in the, I should know, in the late 1980s or perhaps early 1990s called That Noble Dream. And it's about the historical profession in the United States and the founding of the first PhD program in history at Johns Hopkins during the late 19th century.

And the basic point of this book is that the historical profession is a modern formation, and it started in Germany. And the historical profession was basically based on the idea that it could be objective, and we could arrive at objective facts that not only tell us about the past, but might help us predict the future. It's a very optimistic way of looking at history. And of course, the conclusion of this book, That Noble Dream, was concluding that scientific objectivity doesn't apply to the profession of history and by extension, other humanistic disciplines. that there are just so many perspectives and intrinsic biases and so forth that to hold on to that dream of objectivity really isn't very useful as a scholar. It's more important to recognize what biases exist, not only within oneself as a writer, but also in the evidence you encounter, the people you talk to, the time in which you write. You might have a certain politics at a certain period in your life and you're writing in a particular way, but you might move beyond that political perspective later on. So simply to say that we're human. And the idea of, again, some scientific objectivity is really more limiting or illusory than it is helpful in terms of being a scholar, or I would, by extension, say a writer. And even

though I haven't worked in newsrooms, I mean, it seems very, there are a number of affinities as well, that objectivity can be more damaging or limiting than it is generative to telling stories. And I will say that, you know, having said that, I would simply add as a concluding note, it's about a kind of great man history. Hobsbawm, granted white male scholars, but nonetheless trying to move away from a kind of great man history. But also during this period of the 1970s, you have the emergent scholars like Edward Said, who are taking on the thought of people like Frantz Fanon and applying it to scholarship. And the effects of that 70s scholarship had an effect on me about two decades later. And it affects on not just how I write, but what I choose to write, what I choose to write about. And I think that's really important. earlier about, for me, the importance of story and this question, has this story been told before? Is this story helpful in revealing a marginalized perspective? Does this story reinforce the status quo or does it help move things in some positive direction? Those are the kinds of political questions that I'm interested in, as opposed to, again, some sort of very specific partisan point of view. to be aware of that, simply because whether you acknowledge them or not, they most likely will

direct you in certain ways in terms of choosing what you write and how you write it. You've been listening to the second of a two-part series on the non-aligned news agency's pool and its legacy. Thank you to Beatriz Bissio, journalist and associate professor of political science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Mo Lebel, professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan Thank you. at The Conversation and host producer of the podcast, Don't Call Me Resilient, and scholar and writer Christopher J. Lee, lead editor of Safundi, a quarterly journal focused on Southern Africa. The Ideas podcast feed has hundreds of our previous episodes. If you're interested in

more journalism-related programs, take a listen to contributor Anik C's two-part series on media and polarization. So here's the thing. When it comes to how the media, especially commercial media, typically presents a story on an issue, complexity and nuance cuts against the grain of how journalists are taught to cover the news, which has conventionally been to focus on two opposing sides of a story. It's a concept that in the United States, for example, was enshrined as policy in the late 1940s. The policy was called the Fairness Doctrine and required broadcasters to feature contrasting viewpoints in order to prevent the broadcasters from

editorializing or taking a political stance themselves. So they try to be fair and balanced, you know, and have two sides. And again, that's better than one side, but it depends on how that is presented, right? And what we learn is that when you present two sides to an issue that has 10 sides, right, or 10 different aspects, if you present just two sides, then people listen carefully to the side that they're most comfortable with. So trying to be fair and balanced by presenting binary opposites ends up encouraging people to retreat into their already established comfort zones. And so you're really setting people up for more polarization and more division because their attitudes and their beliefs and their information is being reinforced.

And this dynamic of entrenched opinion in turn feeds what's now the media's habit of pitting one provocative voice against another. And the news then becomes entertainment, or as some have called it, confruntainment. He cooperated with them. No, he didn't. That's how he ended up. He cooperated with them. Yelling at doesn't make it true. Yeah, he did cooperated with them. No, he didn't. That's how he ended up. He cooperated with them. Are you kidding? Yelling at doesn't make it true.

Yeah, he did. He said it all. No, no, no. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.