By Anthony Goodman
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Canadian newspaper tycoon Conrad Black said on Thursday that while television had focused attention on tragedies in relatively accessible places, it did not have a good record in revealing the atrocities of repressive governments.
Because television could usually report only from places where it was allowed to do so, "there are frequently irresistible temptations to trade access for favoritism," he told a forum at the United Nations on television.
"I am afraid that CNN was not entirely guiltless of this in reference to Iraq and the Gulf War," Black said.
Canadian television networks were "not blameless on the same score in respect of Cuba," he added.
"They regularly gleefully report on the regime's effort to attract foreign tourists and investment, but are almost pristinely silent about those repressive policies that drove nearly 20 percent of the population of Cuba into incarceration or exile," he said.
In reasonably accessible countries, "television does have some demonstrated aptitude for focusing international attention on heartbreaking conditions," Black said, referring to famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, and factional strife in Somalia and ethnic conflict in Rwanda in the 1990s.
But he added: "It has not any demonstrated capacity for lifting the veil on government-sponsored inhumanity or even monstrous atrocities committed in jurisdictions that go to any serious lengths to restrict television access.
"Thus it largely missed the mass murders in Cambodia, some regrettable excesses in Tibet and ... many of the most egregious actions of the government of Iraq."
Black, whose company, Hollinger International Inc. and its affiliates publish more than 175 newspapers in Canada, the United States, Britain and elsewhere, was the keynote speaker at a U.N. forum on "the future of audio-visual memory."
He said that because television was so dependent on obtaining access on the ground, "there is a natural tendency to give excessive comparative emphasis to the shortcomings of free and open societies and to leave viewers relatively unaware of the extent of abuses in efficiently repressive jurisdictions."
As an example, he said the U.S. television industry had "inadvertently defamed this country ... by inciting the inference that the great cities of America are crime-ridden urban jungles, infested by uncontrollable numbers of violent, drug-crazed criminals."
Steeply falling crimes rates in New York City made it "statistically safer than many of the great cities of Europe," he said.
Referring to the Watergate scandal, Black said the "systematic destruction of Mr. (Richard) Nixon's ability to govern was chiefly the work of television and was ... a good deal less creditable" than print media reporting at the time.
Among the consequences was "the inflammation of the ambitions of an immense number of journalists to be aggressively investigative and to confer on the Washington press corps the preposterous notion that it has some extra-constitutional authority to determine whether the chosen head of the American people is fit to serve the term to which he has been elected."
19:12 11-19-98
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