“I don’t know how we did it, but we did it,” said Marcus Seaton, a senior official with the Bush administration. “Ten whole days of serious decision-making on poverty, environmental protection and the salvation of the planet and humanity, and we managed to leave it at one, maybe two headlines per day.
“It really was brilliant. We certainly don’t have to worry about this issue come election time.”
Exclamations of relief also came at the end of the ten-day Summit from some American media organizations, who had trouble interpreting the complex language of the conference for the uninformed media audiences of the United States.
“‘Corporate accountability?’ ‘Precautionary principle?’ These might as well be Greek to the majority of our audience,” said Ellen Tenley, a vice-president of programming at MSNBC. “And that name too: the ‘World Summit on Sustainable Development’? They were just asking for trouble.”
News organizations from Europe as well as developing countries had more intense coverage of the Summit. The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), covered the summit for two full hours per day of interviews, documentaries and frequent news updates. Viewers around South Africa were briefed long in advance on the concepts of sustainable development, trans-boundary resource conflict resolution, international climate change regimes and corporate accountability.
“It really disappointed me to see that the international community did not adopt a strong action plan for implementing renewable energy technologies at the World Summit,” said Themba Mazibako, a waiter at Piatto Restaurant, in Sandton, Johannesburg where the Summit took place. “Brazil’s proposal of 10% renewables by 2010 was the strongest, but the U.S. blocked them somehow. How are we supposed to stop global warming and meet the human need for energy?”
“World Summit on what?” said Justin Maragolis, a high school teacher in Binghamton, New York. “There was a piece on page five about some environmental thing in Africa or some country like that, and I saw some protesters on CNN. Was that it?”
CNN programmer Alvin Brooks said the network was limiting its coverage of the World Summit, a ten year follow-up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and a response to years of frustration with slow international progress on environmental and social ills.
“We’ve got the anniversary of September 11th coming up, and the administration is trying to promote the Iraq strikes as well. With this stuff, along with the tennis championships and reports on the upcoming fall TV lineup, the World Summit really only got maybe one or two features per day, along with the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen.”
“Maybe if N’Sync had been there they would have gotten a little more coverage,” Brooks commented, recalling that they had been covering N’Sync’s Lance Bass, and his preparations for an upcoming trip into space. The Johannesburg conference attracted over 20,000 people including Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchu, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and governmental and civil society representatives from around the world.
The Summit received low to moderate coverage in the United States, with the least amount of information reaching rural areas and the mid-West. Journalists visiting the Summit from these regions expressed disappointment at not seeing their stories in print.
“There really wasn’t much to cover here,” said Tom Fischer, a reporter from the Milwaukee Daily Reporter, a newspaper in Wisconsin. “On Saturday things perked up a bit because there was a big protest outside. I got a piece on page 12 for that one. Otherwise, it’s just been a bunch of talking heads.”
© GLOBAL YOUTH REPORTERS PROGRAMME 2002
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