The Media and Democracy

John Willis of the IRI (Photo: R. Carmichael, VOA)

Cambodia is moving in the right direction (sic!):
Boeung Kak Lake residents protest forced eviction (Photo: Reuters)

Kingdom of Wonder?
Wonder why the cops shoot at unarmed civilians?
(Photo: John Vink/Magnum)

Sunday, January 23, 2011
Op-Ed by MP

IRI's findings are just another Win-Win endorsement of a closed single party state.

I don't know the methods used to gather public opinion on the government's performance or the effects of public policies on social issues such as public services like roads and the like, but I do see that the majority of Cambodians still live in a closed, insulated environment where public information and opinion making are still largely a product of manufactured uniformity where diversity or dissent is neither tolerated nor encouraged.

It would be interesting to ask the public instead questions pertaining to that closed climate of uniformity, out of which public views of social issues are patterned and shaped, which such findings can be said to merely mirror in the first place. For example, respondents could be quizzed on how much they know about the management and manipulation of television broadcasting operation in Cambodia; how much of an influence/representation, if any, do opposition parties and civil society or organisation have via these state-controlled information delivering outlets; who decide what news items to be aired; who own and fund these television stations; how many stations are owned by the state and how many are in private/commercial hands; what is the media's appropriate functions and responsibilities in respect of news coverage invariably devoted to highlighting the government's 'achievements' in a country still ranked among the world's poorest and most corruption plagued, or is that because negative news reportage has no constructive role to play in the developmental process? Is it because such news compromise or impair people's sense of well-being; that feel-good factor that only popular cultural shows and entertainment programmes are said to engender in their audience?; is it because Khmer people are not at all concerned or have no right to know how many kilometres of Khmer territory or how many villages had been ceded to Vietnam in the last 30 years?; is it because it is not their business to know how much their government has acquired in revenue from off-shore exploration deals, numerous land concessions and sand-dredging operations etc? Or how is this public fund being managed and ploughed back into the mainstream of the national economy?

Do these questions in any way contribute to enhancing people's freedom in determining the quality and veracity of the information they are being fed? Is it possible that only people in power are capable of telling the truth, and that critical views and voices are all born of envy and a tendency to vilify with a view to fermenting chaos and inflaming 'instability' deemed inimical to Progress and Development, a necessity the state has killed, maimed and imprisoned to promote?

If these questions are relevant to evaluating public opinion, then perhaps they should not be left out of any public opinion surveying process. If a Bayon TV reporter approaches a person in the street, accompanied by a filming crew, the person being approached will likely have formulated appropriately compliant responses in his/her mind prior to even being asked any question by the reporter so as not to implicate oneself unwisely before representatives of an authority that does not in the main tolerate opposing views or unorthodox sentiments. This is because Bayon TV is owned by none other than the PM himself.

How credible or representative any survey's data or findings can therefore be judged in context of both its methodologies/ tools deployed to collect such data and the socio-political context that informs - or more precisely enforces - people's views and perceptions in the first instance.

If IRI were to do a similar survey in North Korea, the satisfaction rating of their findings over governmental performances in all areas - not least the development of nuclear capability - leading to the logical deduction that the North Korean nation ‘is heading in the right direction’, might even be greater than that found in Cambodia. In either case, that is not something for humanity to be cheerful about!

Information is a fundamental factor in the promotion of democracy and development worldwide. With freedom of information citizens choose how they like to be governed or maximise their involvement directly or indirectly in every aspect of their everyday life by making their votes and voices count in all spheres of decision-making and deliberation pertinent to their standing as rightful subjects and in line with prescribed legitimate choices; by being empowered to direct matters and realise their outcomes without undue interference from self-interested parties who cannot possibly attain to their specific self-promoted agenda without high- jacking, to some extent, that decision-making power from the clutches of the citizenry. Whilst the quality of public information itself can vary as to its subjectivity, sources and their ulterior motives, this does not by itself justify the manner in which information is being culled or manipulated and monopolised to conform to any one-sided agenda where plurality and diversity are denied and therefore plays no part in the check-and-balance mechanisms that in any open democratic climate act as an indispensible moderating force vis a vis ‘extremist’ tendencies, be they emanate from within the state or elsewhere.

There was a time when scientists were persecuted in Europe for putting forth discoveries that were at odds with traditional religious views of the creation of the universe which, among other things, insisted that the world was flat and stood on the back of a turtle!

So what stood under the turtle? Ah, very clever of you, young man (exclaimed one elderly lady at a Stephen Hawkins lecture); it’s turtles all the way down!

The absence of a relatively free media climate is a much stronger indicator of where society is heading. With freedom of information citizens will have an invaluable access to knowledge - public and private - and this will drastically and qualitatively revolutionise the way they see themselves and relate to the outside world, including their public servants who have hitherto been more of their tyrannical masters and oppressors; bearing in mind also that government officials are recruited from the rank of the population at large. Time - say apologists of the regime – is of the essence in terms of what is needed to inculcate in these officials a culture of professionalism, accountability and integrity in public service through learning and training generally. Yet, one searches in vain for signs that such presumptions have actually been put into practical effect. Incompetence committed in public life by government officials leading to large-scale public tragedy such as the recent Diamond Bridge event ought to have opened up ample scope into which that culture of learning and responsibility be implanted, if only as a benchmark and reminder of the costly price of professional misconduct or incompetence. Instead, true to form, the compliant TV media chose to keep its spot light for several airing hours upon a grief-stricken, overemotional and tearful Prime Minister, who quickly ordered the investigation into that incident closed, declaring no one is to blame!

How does one hope to improve the quality of democratic governance without improving or changing the quality of the ballot box? How many people vote for a party simply because their patron or local village chief tells them to do so? Why are some people still being disenfranchised by not being issued with the appropriate documents whilst most foreigners are said to have all the legal paperwork? Is rural poverty being deliberately overlooked because it helps to preserve the poor’s dependence upon the existing patronage system for meagre handouts and hence their continued political/electoral fidelity to the ruling party? If the international community recognised the results of previous elections as free and fair, so what? Like the findings of this IRI survey are purported to show? If the world community (Western governments) take a more stringent view towards political and democratic developments in Cambodia (which continue to deteriorate alarmingly) will they not then be morally more duty-bound to back their words with their actions? Surely, with their personnel and high tech resources in every capital of the world, they do not need you and me or IRI to tell them what is going wrong in this ‘Kingdom of Wonder’, do they?

Remember it had taken these same governments decades to resolve the ‘Kampuchean conflict’, and having performed a somewhat contrived surgery upon this prolonged haemorrhage (which they, in fact, had had some part in rendering historically), they now have little incentive to find themselves in that awkward situation again, leaving Hanoi and its underlings to run –more or less - all the show in Indochina.