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Developing News

Developing News sets out to describe how development is

articulated in the news and used by newspeople as an analytical
category to explain the world. It is about examining development as
a discourse that is based on the harmful contrast between the
developed and the developing (or the underdeveloped) and that sets
the boundaries for what is permissible to say.
Jairo Lugo-Ocando and An Nguyen begin by discussing the news
coverage of development that emerged as a news category for
newspapers and broadcasters after World War II. They move on to
examine the way development has been reported by the mainstream
media, exploring the rationales and ideologies that determined and
continue to define the way the media think about and represent
development in the news. In doing so, the authors contribute to a
better understanding of the relationship between the news agenda,
news sources and the development policies that are set in the
centres of power.
This book is ideal for those studying and researching issues to do
with journalism and the “Third World”. It may also be relevant for
those students taking courses in global or international journalism,
media and democracy, development studies or international politics.
Above all, it is an invitation for journalists to rethink their own
practice in representing international development and its
components.
Jairo Lugo-Ocando is an Associate Professor in the School of
Media and Communication at the University of Leeds in the United
Kingdom. Before becoming an academic he worked as a
correspondent and news editor for several media outlets in Latin
America and the US.

An Nguyen an Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of

Journalism, English and Communication at Bournemouth University
in the United Kingdom. A former Vietnamese journalist and an
Australian-educated scholar, he has published widely in several
areas, including digital news consumption and citizenship, public
engagement with science news, and news and socio-political
changes in a globalising world.
Developing News
Global journalism and the coverage of “Third World”
development

Jairo Lugo-Ocando and An Nguyen

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2017 Jairo Lugo-Ocando and An Nguyen; Anya Schiffrin and
Audrey Ariss for Chapter 5: News coverage of foreign aid: a case
study of the Millennium Village Project in African, US and UK media.
The right of Jairo Lugo-Ocando and An Nguyen to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lugo-Ocando, Jairo, author. | Nguyen, An, 1975– author.
Title: Developing news : global journalism and the coverage of “third
world” development / by Jairo Lugo-Ocando and An Nguyen.
Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes
 bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036621 | ISBN 9780415621823 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315269245 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Developing countries—Press coverage—Western
countries.
Classification: LCC PN4784.D47 .L84 2017 | DDC 070.4/332—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036621
ISBN: 978-0-415-62182-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-26924-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: The elusive, shape-shifting nature of

development in the news
What is development, anyway?
This book’s critical examination of development news
Thematic organisation

1 The “tokenisation” of development in the news

Making poverty newsworthy
The focus on events and disasters
Dramatic storylines: Goodies versus baddies
The “celebritisation” of poverty
The ‘cult of economics’
An exact science?
“Kicking the ladder”
Dominance of Western worldviews
Authoritative power to speak
Practical challenges in newsgathering
Any hope for change?

2 Journalistic conventions and the geopolitics of

development narratives
 Geopolitics in news articulation
Pack mentality and journalistic conventions
Development news as geopolitical propaganda
From colonial rhetoric to Truman’s development categories
Cold War discourses
Concluding notes

3 The “number game” in development news

Naïve empiricism
“Numbers rule the world”
One dollar per day to get out of poverty?
The holy grail of GDP
Concluding notes

4 Communicating containment and the Alliance for

Progress
Ideological and practical factors
Alliance for progress as a propagandist narrative
The “equal partnership” discourse
Mediatised development
Lessons from the Alliance

5 News coverage of foreign aid: A case study of the

Millennium Villages Project in African, US and UK media
Background to the chapter: The many problems of news
coverage of foreign aid
Background on the MVP
About this study
African press coverage of the villages
US/UK coverage of the MVP
Early stages: Ideologies and personalities as news
Second phase: Critical voices from the blogosphere
Third phase: The Idealist
Constraints on media reporting
Conclusion
6 Disempowering news: The feminisation of development
The feminisation of poverty
“Empowering” women – for less gender justice?
Gendered news practices

7 New technologies for old ideas

An ICT-driven new economy
Technology as geopolitics
Technology as colonial legitimisation
Technology without politics?

8 Malthusianism and news framing of population growth

Shifting the blame
Legitimising racism
Malthusianism returns as the bell curve
Towards a better news articulation of population issues

Conclusion: Beyond the North-to-South lecture: Can the

news media ever get to the core of development?
Us-versus-them propaganda
What is being ‘sold’
What is being missed
Where to from here?

References
Index
Figures

5.1 Number of articles by type and country

5.2 Tone of articles
5.3 Number of articles published about the MVP in digital and print
publications and blogs
Acknowledgements

As most works, this book is a collective effort. Let it be no doubt that

any flaw or issue is entirely of our own making, but we would like to
acknowledge a series of institutions and people that made possible
this book. Firstly, we would want to thank the awarding committee
of the Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship from the John F.
Kennedy library in the United States which made possible a great
deal of the research that was carried out for this project. We would
like to thank the University of Leeds and Bournemouth University for
the resources that they spent on the research work that leads to this
book. We would want to thank the publishing team at Routledge for
trusting us with this project.
We would want to specially thank award-winning documentary
photographer, Kai Löffelbein, for allowing us to use his pictures of
children in Ghana recycling German toxic waste. Löffelbein is one of
those photojournalists who manages to create that necessary
connection between our own life styles in the West and the lives of
those living in poverty in the Global South. Finally, a huge thank you
to our families who gave us their patience while we worked on it. We
dedicate this book to them as well as to our families and friends
back in the Global South with the hope for a better future.
Introduction
The elusive, shape-shifting nature of
development in the news

On October 15, 1880, John Rowlands – better known in history as

Henry Morton Stanley – wrote the following in his diaries: “We went
to Africa uninvited, therein lies our fault. But it was not so grave that
our lives [when threatened] should be forfeited” (cited by Jeal,
2007: 14). These brief lines from the renowned journalist and
explorer, who was perhaps known best for his rescue of David
Livingstone, illustrate the vice circle that characterised the adventure
of civilisation: one of semi-apologetic intervention followed by
violence claiming to be self-defence. It reflects the same rationale
for the interventions of the past in Congo and of the present in Iraq
and Afghanistan and will probably be used again to justify others in
the future. Indeed, the notion of civilisation has been used
throughout history, from the ancient world to the British Empire, to
legitimise conquest and expansion. It is a concept that has survived
time and, since the late 1940s, gone through a “metamorphosis” to
become a category that is widely referred to today as development.

What is development, anyway?

Development, understood as the generation of social changes to
allow people and societies to achieve their human potential,
especially through economic growth and social progress, has been “a
central organising concept” of the world (Naz, 2006: 64) since Harry
S Truman formally established it in his inaugural presidency speech
on January 20, 1949. From the ashes of World War II, the speech
broke away from the shadow of the colonial past, dividing the globe
into two worlds: the vast majority in the South as the
“underdeveloped” and a handful in the North as the “developed”.
Under this new worldview, as Wolfgang Sachs (1992) pointed out,
“all the peoples of the earth were to move along the same track and
aspire to only one goal – development”. The speech was “the
starting gun in the race for the South to catch up with the North”,
presumably with the “technical assistance” of the North to achieve
“greater production” as the key to peace and prosperity (Sachs,
1992). This model was clearly outlined in Truman’s speech:

With the cooperation of business, private capital, agriculture, and

labor in this country, this program can greatly increase the
industrial activity in other nations and can raise substantially their
standards of living. Such new economic developments must be
devised and controlled to the benefit of the peoples of the areas
in which they are established. Guarantees to the investor must
be balanced by guarantees in the interest of the people whose
resources and whose labor go into these developments. The old
imperialism-exploitation for foreign profit has no place in our
plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on
the concepts of democratic fair-dealing. All countries, including
our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the
better use of the world’s human and natural resources.
Experience shows that our commerce with other countries
expands as they progress industrially and economically. Greater
production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to
greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of
modern scientific and technical knowledge.
(Truman, 1949)
This precisely reflects the blueprint that defines the discursive
regime in which journalists would articulate news on development
from the 1950s onwards. It incorporated the notion of development
in such a way that newspeople around the world wholeheartedly
embrace it. It went on to become a fundamental part of the so-
called “strategic narratives” allowing political actors to construct,
primarily through the media, a shared meaning of the past, present
and future of international politics in order to shape the behaviour of
domestic and international stakeholders. In other words,
development news narratives became a tool to extend political
influence, manage expectations and change the discursive
environment that defined, until then, the order of things to be
(Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Rosell, 2013:2). However, as we shall
argue, far from static, the notion of development in media
discourses has been continuously changing and adapting to new
historical events.
Development became the formal post-war policy towards the
periphery of the two new superpowers, the United States of America
and the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and
therefore was intrinsically linked to their international propaganda
efforts. Both countries attempted to overcome the no longer
acceptable categories such as “civilisation” and “colonisation” that
had been linked to the dying European empires. The superpowers
emerging from the war were not aspiring empires in the traditional
sense: they brought instead new forms of control and domination
that combined hegemony and coercion in ways that humanity had
never seen before. They could create new markets, invade lands or
impose political systems in their satellites, but they did so in ways
that seem to respect to some degree the independence and
autonomy of subservient states (with a few exceptions such as the
occasional military intervention in Central America and Eastern
Europe during the Cold War). As seen in the above-quoted excerpt
from Truman’s speech, this new approach was far subtler and
demanded a discursive regime that made it attractive for countries
to remain on or switch to one side or the other. It was a period that
was characterised by a new type of war, the Cold War, one that saw
as many disruptions as continuities in relation to development
policies and that, consequently, demanded new discursive
approaches.
One of these demands came from the fact that despite its
predominance in the global policy and media agenda since World
War II, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
development as a concept is rather empty (Sachs, 1992) or at least,
as Farzana Naz pointed out, ambiguous, elusive and much
contested:

Since the Second World War, development has been synonymous

with economic, social and political change in the countries of
Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
These countries have been variously labelled as underdeveloped,
less-development, developing, the Third World and the South.
They are a diverse group but united in their commonly declared
commitment to development. But, there is no consensus about
the meaning of development. It is a contested concept and there
have been a number of battles to capture its meaning.
(Naz, 2006: 65)

Indeed, development as a concept did not come somehow out of the

blue in 1949 (Helleiner, 2014: 17). In the wider historical context of
international relations and power maintenance, development is far
from a recent addition. It was just an adaptation of pre-existing
discourse regimes that had been “sold” to the public, under different
labels, to allow powers to justify the continuity of colonialism in post-
colonial times. In the United States, for instance, the modern
concept of development existed under the label of “civilization” in
the 19th century, when there was the widespread belief that United
States settlers were destined to expand throughout the continent.
The news media in fact have always played an instrumental role in
embracing, legitimising and advancing discourses such as civilisation
and development. Indeed, it was a newspaper editor, John
O’Sullivan, who coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in 1845 (Gomez,
2012: 236) to describe the special virtues of the non-native
American people and institutions, their predestined mission to
redeem and remake the West into agrarian colony, and their
irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty. For the then-
incipient United States of America, this meant new territories and
possibilities. For the Native American and the Mexican, however, it
meant genocide and the reinstitution of slavery (Blackburn, 2013
[2011]: 346). As can be seen, the key components of the
development concept as Truman outlined in 1949 and as we largely
understand it today – such as economic growth and technological
progress – have long been co-existing and working hand in hand
with colonial concepts such as exclusion and exploitation.

This book’s critical examination of

development news
It is with this paradoxical co-existence that we open this book and
start our quest to understand why newspeople, such as John
O’Sullivan, John Rowlands and many generations of journalists since
them, have put their reason and talents towards justifying what is by
all means intervention and conquest. For some readers, there seems
to be a simple and clear explanation for this: those in the media are,
after all, agents of power and thus reflect the ideas and discourses
of those who control the means of production (Aronczyk, 2013;
Herman & Chomsky, 2008 [1988]). However, as we shall discuss, the
political economy of the media is far from sufficient to explain why
the category of development has such a grip upon the worldviews
that dominate the newsroom’s approach to the so-called Global
South.
While many scholars have studied the role of the media in
promoting development (Rogers, 1976; Schramm, 1963, 1964;
Servaes, 1999, 2008), the actual news coverage has not been
sufficiently studied, especially since the end of the Cold War. We
know, however, some important missing aspects of this coverage –
e.g. journalists tend to leave aside the causes and the contexts of
poverty issues such as social exclusion (Gans, 1995; Golding &
Elliott, 1979; Lugo-Ocando, 2015). We know that the overall
coverage of development is minimal compared with other news
content. We also know that the use of sources is problematic and
that quotes used in development news stories mostly come from
government officials, NGOs and businessmen, despite the fact that
these voices do not always represent the interests of the general
public or those living in harsh conditions. However, much more
research is required to better understand the relationship between
the news agenda, news sources and the development policies that
are set in the centres of power. This is the urgent call that led us to
this book.
The book, we should stress, is not about “development
journalism” as a functionalist model for the media in many countries,
a subject that continues to be well researched in our field by many
scholars (Ogan, 1980; Waisbord, 2010; Wong, 2004; Xiaoge, 2009).
Rather, it is about how development is articulated in the Western
news media and used by newspeople as an analytical category to
explain the world. It is about examining development as a discursive
regime that is based on a harmful dichotomy between the developed
and the developing (or the underdeveloped) and that sets the
boundaries for what is permissible to say. To us, this is crucially
important because, as Escobar (1995: 24) argues, “development as
discourse shares structural features with other colonizing discourses,
such as Orientalism”. In this sense, Escobar quoted Said (1978) to
argue that development discourse “can be discussed and analysed
as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with
it by making statements about it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling
over it” and to point out that “likewise, development has functioned
as an all-powerful mechanism for the production and management
of Third World in the post-1945 period” (1978: 24).
We entitled this book Developing News, borrowing the term from
the so-called “developing story” in today’s 24-hour news cycle. Like
the “developing story”, which constantly changes along with new,
emerging details throughout the course of events, development as a
news category constantly shifts its shape to adapt to changing
requirements of the wider power discourses throughout the course
of history. Far from the general public impression of it as a clear,
static and monolithic concept, “development” has always been
elusive in the media since the term was first enunciated in the post-
war time. Originally entailing the same post-colonial elements that
allowed the US and the Soviet Union to advance their own interests
and ideologies after 1945 in former European colonies, the
development concept has mutated with every decade since then, to
become the zeitgeist of journalists and news executives. Over the
years, development has been a moving target for journalists. Unable
to pin down its exact meaning, they tend to accept the same
definitions and measurements imposed by those in power. As these
definitive and measuring scales change over time, so do the wider
discourse of development and its associated power frame in the
news.
The “discursive regime” (Gee, 2014 [1999]) that frames and
defines intertextuality in news about development has been shaped
by a number of historical social constructions of reality. As will be
seen, many historical events are interpreted by those in power in a
manner that makes them become pivotal for conceptualising
development as an international phenomenon. These constructions
continue to be, despite changes over the years in their language and
underlining narratives, the main referent for journalists in producing
stories about development. So when these superpowers said that
development was about “dams”, “buildings”, “better crop irrigation”
or “extensive use of pesticides”, journalism understood and
measured development success in those terms. When the discursive
frame of development shifted the focus to “fast industrialisation” and
“urbanisation”, so did the articulation of news. Similarly, journalism
practised inside global newsrooms was the first to embrace the
“shock therapy” economic recipes of the Structural Adjustment
Programmes inspired by the Washington Consensus of the 1980s, or
to implicitly and explicitly support the recent austerity measures that
have led millions in Europe to a level of poverty not seen since the
end of World War II.
 One of the most important transitions in the way journalists cover
development came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
disintegration of the Eastern bloc and the embracement of a more
market-driven economy by the few remaining Communist-ruled
countries such as China and Vietnam. These events served to
resurrect Hegelian notions of steady progress towards a liberal and
global society (Becerra, 2003: 25). Soon afterwards, many authors
started to talk not only of a “Western model” but went even further
to suggest the need to universalise “Western values” through a
process of “cultural convergence” (Fukuyama, 2001) in which
modernity and universal culture were “two sides of the same coin”
(Pinzón & Garay, 1997: 21). A new worldview emerged and
established the Western paradigm of liberal democracy and market-
driven economy as the only proposition for the future of the Global
South. Among the most noteworthy constructions are economic
growth, modernisation, free markets and globalisation. They remain
crucial and powerful in shaping news about development because
anything that falls outside these referents is considered – especially
after the collapse of the Soviet Union – ‘irrational’ in the face of what
some have called “the marketisation of global communication”
(Thussu, 2005: 47).
The media’s almost unconditional acceptance of these
constructions has its own historical root, namely the emergence of
modern journalism as an objectivity-based commercial enterprise
during the Enlightenment (Pettegree, 2014; Ward, 2005b), a political
project with intrinsic links to such constructions (Conboy, 2004;
Schiller, 1981; Schudson, 1981). As we shall elaborate later, modern
journalism, being a by-product of this political project, continues to
place its 17th- and 18th-century worldviews at the heart of its day-
to-day objectivity strategies and practices. These practices, emerging
alongside the new epistemology provided by the Enlightenment,
“tried persistently to replicate its methods, emulate its practices and
make similar claims of legitimacy for the ‘truths’ it provided”, and as
such, “replicated the flaws and shortcomings of the Enlightenment
as a political project (as did anthropology, economics, politics and
sociology) in trying to interpret humanity in scientific terms”
(Martinisi & Lugo-Ocando, 2015: 441).
In addition, modern journalism emerged at the same time as land
enclosures and the destruction of collective property in England was
taking place both in its colonies and at home in the 17th century.
This was a process that demanded a worldview that put the
individual at the centre of the universe rather than as a part of the
wider collective society. Indeed, looking at the social and political
upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market
economy, Karl Polanyi suggested in The Great Transformation (1992
[1944]) that modern economies and modern nation-states should be
understood not as discrete elements but as the single human
invention which he called the “market society”. The global media,
particularly news agencies, developed alongside this great
transformation and consequently adopted and embraced its main
ideology (Boyd-Barrett, 2000b; Paterson, 2005, 2011), with the
“market economy” being established as an intrinsic ideological
framework for journalism’s understanding of the world out there. In
fact, the spreading of the political category of development among
politicians and policy planners after World War II came hand in hand
with the consolidation of the US news media at the top of the
world’s agenda setting power and overall influence. It also happened
in parallel to the expansion of an international news market and
growing literacy rates that helped commodify large segments of the
world population as consumer audiences, allowing the US media to
sell the idea of a “market society” as a means of progress. It was in
this period that news articulation and dissemination became
increasingly supported and defined by market expansion and
economic growth, the very same thing that underpinned
development, as strategic narratives.
This book is intended to be a modest contribution, although
ambitious in its aim, to our understanding of news articulation of
development. We have concentrated on the Western media,
especially those in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and
have left out, except for brief mentions, the media from developing
countries. Although we are well aware of important examples of
excellent and influential development news reporting by some
journalists from the developing world we chose to focus on the
Western media because they are, all in all, still the most influential in
setting the global news agenda. As well as being watched and read
in the West, media outlets such as CNN and BBC, or news agencies
such as Thomson Reuters and Associated Press, dominate much of
the global news feed for non-Western audiences, who often assign
more credibility to such outlets than their national news suppliers.
Although much of that feed is more or less “domesticated” by local
news providers (Clausen, 2004), Western news agencies and
networks still have a wide sphere of influences, playing an agenda-
setting role and thus being a critical force in influencing policy design
and fundraising for poor areas of the planet. In the aftermath of the
2004 tsunami, for example, it has been said, that every additional
700-word story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal raised
donations by 18% of the daily average (Brown, 2006).
We have selected to examine an important period of human
history that goes back to the end of World War II, which led to the
unprecedented expansion of technology and knowledge across the
globe and marked the beginning of the Cold War. The post war is a
fascinating historical period to begin a critical examination of
development discourses in Western media, because it marks the
beginning of an era in which humanity needed to come to terms
with the horrors of its own past. To avoid cognitive dissonance, the
former and new empires “manufactured” a historical disruption to
allow themselves to draw a line in the sand by which Nazi
concentration camps were portrayed as a monstrosity that had
nothing to do with the past and, therefore, would be avoidable in
the future. Dominic Losurdo, in his seminal critique of liberalism,
deconstructs this historical disruption discourse in eloquent terms:

The horror of the twentieth century was not something that burst
into a world of peaceful coexistence suddenly and from without.
At the same time, being dissatisfied with the edifying picture of
the habitual hagiography and situating oneself on the firm
 ground of reality, with its contradictions and conflicts, does not in
any way mean denying the merits and strong points of the
intellectual tradition under examination [Liberalism]. But we
certainly must bid farewell once and for all the myth of the
gradual, peaceful transition.
(Losurdo, 2014: 340–341)

Development as a discursive regime is precisely an attempt to

socially construct that disruption as a modern reality, even though it
is in essence a continuity of the old international colonial order. As
such, journalists who use development uncritically as a category do
a disservice to both their audiences and the people about whom
they report. This is because it disassociates and distracts people
from the important need to take necessary actions against power. As
Paulo Freire reminds us:

In order for the oppressed to wage the struggle for the liberation,
they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed
world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation
which they can transform. This condition is a necessary but not a
sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating
force for liberating action. Nor the discovery by the oppressed
that they exist in dialectical relationship to the oppressor, as his
antithesis – that without them the oppressor could not exist – in
itself constitute liberation. The oppressed can overcome the
contradiction in which they are caught only when this perception
enlists them in the struggle to free themselves. The same is true
with respect to the individual oppressor as a person. Discovering
himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but
it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed.
Rationalizing the guilt through paternalistic treatment of the
oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of
dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into
 the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical
posture.
(Freire, 1993[1970]: 31)

In this book, we adopt the dichotomous terms of “developing

countries” (which will be used interchangeably with Third World or
Global South) and “developed countries” (or First World, West and
Global North). We do so not because we have any predisposition,
but merely to facilitate the discussion. In all truths, these terms are
meaningless, except to allow the type of generalisation that we will
be making across the pages of this book. It might seem paradoxical
that two authors claiming to examine the problematic use of a
dichotomous discursive regime about development are in fact using
the same terms they criticise. However, we do not see language as
the problem in itself: what matters is the conceptualisation that
allows those in the newsroom to use these terms in the way they do.

Thematic organisation
We have divided this book into eight main chapters along the key
themes and issues that, in our views, define news coverage – and,
to a certain extent, public understanding – of development and
development policies. This structure, we feel is appropriate to
discuss the key arguments we have set to explore while at the same
time is accessible enough to allow readers to engage with discussion
in a meaningful and personalised manner.
Chapter 1 discusses the “tokenisation of development” in the
news, aiming to provide an overview of the key problems in news
coverage of development. We argue that Western journalism about
development often focuses too much on symbolic tokens. These
tokens are a decoy that tends to distract them towards the
manifestation and away from the root causes of poverty, which
development policy should aim to tackle. Instead of offering a truly
critical news agenda on inequality and social exclusion as the
underlining cause of poverty and scrutinising related policies, news
tends to “sell” symbols of progress that are meaningless to people
on the ground, especially those living in poverty. We will examine in
detail three main groups of factors that contribute to this
tokenisation: (a) journalists’ attempts to make poverty and
development newsworthy through focussing on events, drama and
celebrities; (b) journalists’ uncritical and unconditional subscription
to the role of the often wrong “economic science” in lifting people
out of poverty; and (c) the dominance of Western worldviews in
development news discourses, due to journalists’ preferences for
elite sources with “authoritative power” as well as to the practical
challenges they face in finding and accessing alternative sources
(e.g. those experiencing poverty and implementing solutions on the
ground).
Chapter 2 brings the issues in Chapter 1 to a deeper level of
analysis, demonstrating that although journalists follow a certain
symbolic rationale to allocate authoritative power to news sources,
this rationale is not always based on a systematic and well-
structured process, but merely on their collective worldviews
regarding power and authority. This chapter explores how this ‘pack
mentality’ (or groupthink) affects the way journalists articulate news
about development. In particular, we will examine how this mentality
creates journalists’ narrative conventions or established ‘truths’ on
development, which in turn play a crucial role in geopolitical
propaganda by powers such as the US and the former USSR. In
doing so, we will examine how dominant economic ideas have come
to shape news discourses on development and how they have
changed since 1945. With a focus on the transformations and
continuities of the most prevalent news narratives on development,
we hope to shed some light on why development news has become
so embedded in dominant economic ideas and why journalists have
persistently failed to challenge them over the time. Geopolitics will
be discussed as an important framework to explain the
representation of development in the news.
Chapter 3 exemplifies some of the problems of development
economics through a detailed examination of measurable indicators
that are often used to substantiate economic claims in the news. As
a pervasive feature and an integral part of public discourse on
prevalent discourses of progress and modernity, data and statistics
occupy a prominent place in news coverage of development. We will
discuss how newspeople, under the dual influence of “naïve
empiricism” and prevalent ideologies, often embrace numbers as a
rigorous, objective representation of reality and let them pass
through unchecked, unquestioned and unscrutinised. However,
statistics are far from objective measures of social reality and, in
many cases, have only served to advance propaganda. Like other
measurements, statistics have a politics of their own and serve the
purpose of reinforcing dominant ideology or existing power. With a
laissez-faire approach to statistics, journalists socially construct a
reality that conforms to, rather than challenges, the official policies
and approaches being pursued by those in power. This leads to,
among other things, a perpetuation of the existing geopolitical order
and the ideologies of those elite powers behind it. In order to
substantiate this, we will present two detailed case studies: the
World Bank’s one-dollar-per-day poverty threshold and the universal
but deeply flawed GDP figures.
Chapter 4 examines how geopolitical prerogatives defined
development news discourses during the Cold War through the case
of John F. Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress in Latin
America. Alliance for Progress was a set of policies to promote social
reform and growth that was designed as a direct response to the
communist threat to US hegemony in this region. As policy, it
entailed most of the Cold War’s power struggle elements that came
to define news reporting of development for the decades to come.
The case shed light on the role of political communication in the
articulation of news about the developing world. We take a focus on
how JFK’s officials presented the Alliance to the media through press
briefings and conferences as well as the background documents that
accompanied the preparation of these materials. In so doing, we
explore (a) how these stories appeared in the news in the US and
Latin American countries; (b) how such media content was
embedded in ideological discourses on development of the time; and
(c) how development policy design and implementation were
mediatised (i.e. influenced by news coverage). Overall, the chapter
offers an interdisciplinary, historicised understanding of how
development policy is presented to the wider public and how policy
formulation and propaganda goals are often intrinsically linked to the
extent that neither policies nor news can be disentangled from
propaganda.
Chapter 5 examines news representation of foreign aid, another
problematic area of development news discourse. As a major vehicle
for the North to make development possible in the South, foreign aid
is probably the most emblematic manifestation of international
development policy, representing the cornerstone of all development
intervention and a microcosm of the former’s foreign policies and
ideologies. Although previous research shows that the amount of
news coverage of foreign aid in a particular donor country has the
most consistent and most substantial influence on its aid allocation
strategies and approaches, our general knowledge and
understanding of the factors shaping such news coverage is still
limited. We, therefore, will first provide a short ‘catalogue’ of some
of the key issues that explains why foreign aid is often treated in a
flawed and red-herring manner in the Western media. Then, towards
a better understanding, we enlist two colleagues from the School of
International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, Anya Schiffrin
and Audrey Ariss, to present a content analysis of how the
mainstream media and blogosphere in nine African countries as well
as the US and the UK covered the famous well-funded Millennium
Villages Project (MVP). Their analysis of 10 years of news coverage
(2005–2015), which was complemented by in-depth interviews with
Ugandan and US journalists, not only confirms some of the broad
issues we have highlighted by then, but also raises a number of
questions for future research. Accordingly, news reporting of the
MVP in all 11 countries was rather sparse, short, superficial and
dependent on official press releases and celebrity sources. African
coverage of MPV was all too enthusiastic and cheerful throughout
the study period, despite being exposed to some critical
perspectives. US and UK news, influenced by an increasing number
of critical bloggers, fared a little better, moving from an early burst
of favourable stories to increasingly analytical reporting. This
reached a peak after the publication of The Idealist, a long-form
investigative journalism book by Nina Munk, in 2013. Against this
backdrop, the authors found some of the practical constraints on
reporting the MVP, such as the press freedom climate and the
“nation building” concept in African countries, and the pressures
imposed by elite sources in Western countries on the few journalists
who dare to question the initiative.
Chapter 6 moves to another crucial area of development, gender
equality. As a key aim of modernity and progress, gender equality is
at the heart of the construction of strategic narratives on
development, especially those on global efforts to tackle poverty.
The media, as a key cultural force that can create, reinforce or
challenge certain gender stereotypes and narratives, has a crucial
role in shaping gender-related development policy on the ground.
Yet, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, the articulation of news
about gender issues in development and development policies has
not been helpful in tackling gender-generated poverty. Gender
remains to be a token and one of the most misleading issues in
news coverage of poverty due in a large part to two factors: (a) an
unconditional subscription to neoliberal ideologies in the
‘feminisation’ of poverty and development policies since the 1970s,
which leads to an ignorance of structural gender inequality; and (b)
prevalent gendered practices in newsrooms themselves, which tend
to discourage any idea and approach that can challenge such
subscription.
Chapter 7 focuses on the never-resolved paradox around the role
of technology in discourses about progress and modernity. As a
socially constructed reality, technology highlights and underpins the
notion of modernity: it asserts and re-asserts that we ought to be
modern to access technology and, at the same time, access to
technology makes us modern. In recent decades, especially since
the end of the Cold War, news discourse has emphasised technology
as an inevitable agent in bringing democratic freedom and fostering
economic progress, as well as a panacea for reducing poverty and
fixing other problems such as global warming and environmental
degradation. Beneath the surface, however, it is precisely because of
this simplistic, sometimes naïve, techno-determinism that news
coverage of technology serves as just another smoke screen that
distracts the public from the many vested economic and political
interests behind technological innovation, especially the West’s
geopolitical power and its prevailing neoliberal ideologies. All too
often, news presents the intersection between technology and
society as being deprived of socio-political context, thus giving a
very different meaning to progress. Widespread prosperity and
technological advances continue to be constantly linked to justify the
West’s colonial past and its supposed positive legacies of progress
and modernity.
Chapter 8 continues the discussion with an anatomy of the deeply
problematic news discourse about population growth, namely the
Malthusian belief that it is the root cause of resource depletion and
underdevelopment in the Global South. This has long served as a
discursive regime for journalists and thinkers to construct narratives
and build subservient arguments on the population-development
relationship, as well as to develop a deontological basis to ethically
assess and frame that relationship in the news. Instead of an
unequal system of wealth production and distribution, the blame for
poverty has been shifted to population growth. At the same time,
more important causes of environmental degradation, such as the
consumption patterns of the rich, are ignored. Despite their still
questionable ground, this type of explanatory framework on
population and development continues to prevail in the news. In
tracing this discursive regime to the theory on population growth of
Thomas Robert Malthus in the late 18th century, we will explore how
journalism, in its long history of acting in subservient capacity to
elite and powerful sources under the rule of objectivity and false
journalistic conventions, has mutated his key ideas over the time to
serve power discourses of population and development, including
racist schools of thoughts such as Social Darwinism, eugenics and,
more recently, the “Bell Curve” on intelligence difference between
races.
 In the Conclusion chapter, we re-examine development news as a
category that needs to be understood, in our view, within the wider
context of geopolitical propaganda. Development as a news category
is part of communicative action effort directed at reinforcing current
structures of power through narratives that continue to make
distinctions between ‘them-versus-us’ by underpinning
underdeveloped and developed classifications (although in 2016 the
World Bank announced that it would be dropping these categories
altogether from their official documents). As part of a discursive
framework, this terminology not only misses that most of the North’s
development recipes for the South were never tried or followed, but
also often denies the brutal colonial history that leads to poverty in
the South. The final section then goes to explore whether new
approaches and practices in the realm of developing news are
possible. In this sense, the chapter analyses what is the future of
development in the news agenda, while arguing that this future is
intrinsically linked to a wider discussion that reaches out for more
critical notions of journalism, society and well-being.
Finally, we would want to explain a gap in the book that we
deliberately left out. That is the way the mainstream media have
reported resistance movements and alternative voices towards
development. There are several reasons why we considered that this
very relevant topic fell outside the scope of this book, but the
primary one is that we wanted to concentrate on the articulation of
discourses of power, in particular how the discursive regimes had
been set from the North and how the media in those countries had
responded and embraced them. Also we felt that the issue of
resistance voices in the media has already been approached
diligently and comprehensively by a series of authors (Dencik &
Wilkin, 2015; Hands, 2011; Waisbord & Segura, 2016) who have
explored critically both the notions of civil society and the way
alternative voices interact with development policy. This is not to say
that there is no scope for further research in that area. On the
contrary, and that is our third reason, there is a whole project in the
making that needs to look exclusively at how the media have
reported and represented the historical agency, responses and
interventions from the Global South towards the post-war
development paradigm. That will be perhaps our next step.
1 The “tokenisation” of
development in the news

“What is development for? Is it to build dams? To increase the

crops? Or is it to send a man to the moon?” These simple questions,
raised by the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (2002: 6),
encapsulated the paradox of news reporting on development: while
it concentrates in the symbolic evidence of progress, it misses
altogether the futility of the policies and acts that are purported to
improve the life of those in poverty. For the thousands of millions
who live in poverty, the billions of dollars in foreign aid and loans
provided over the years by national governments, multilateral
organisations and NGOs have made little or no difference to their
lives (Easterly, 2003; Yontcheva & Masud, 2005). As Palagummi
Sainath, who has decades of reporting development in India, argues,
“development is the strategy of evasion” (1996: 331): people’s
needs are one thing, what policy makers deliver is entirely another.
Journalism about development tends to reflect this evasion pattern,
rarely going beyond the zeitgeist or dominant ideas of the time
(Lugo-Ocando, 2015: 78). As such, news about development focuses
on decoy tokens, representing symbols of progress that in reality are
meaningless to people on the ground, especially those living in
poverty.
One of the first things we did for this book was to briefly examine
via LexisNexis how the news media cover poverty. The result was
not particularly uplifting: less than half (47%) of over 2,500 articles
about poverty in five British broadsheets between 2010 and 2014
mentioned “policy”, and from that just over 10% offered any critical
or analytical views to the related policies. Often one sees a clear
emphasis on the surface problems of poverty – such as wars,
famines and migration – and a recurrent emphasis in economic
growth as the possible solution. Broadcast news is not different: all
but 12 of a sample of 103 poverty news stories from BBC and CNN
in 2013 incorporated critical news sources in their stories a lack of
critical sources. And although we found business pages or
specialised publications offer a more balanced variety of sources and
discussions of the pros and cons of policies, the amount of such
discussions is rather modest. For example, only 51 of the 867 stories
in the Financial Times on the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) between 2000 and 2010 discussed its effects on the labour
market and just 42 stories (or 5%) mentioned words related to
“poverty”.
This preliminary analysis was in line with other research, which
has over the years shown that the media in developed countries
have done a very poor job in covering global poverty in particular
and development issues in general (Lugo-Ocando, 2015; Malaolu,
2014; Scott, 2009). Instead of offering a truly critical news agenda
on inequality and social exclusion as the underlining cause of poverty
and scrutinising related development policies, news tends to
concentrate on symbolic decoys that are the manifestations, but not
the root causes, of poverty. This process of “tokenisation” – which
should not be mistaken for the same term used in computer science
or linguistics – refers to the substitution of facts that reflect
improvements in people’s life for those that give the appearance but
are not legitimate measurements of poverty alleviation or well-being
enhancement. News reporting of development often acts like an
unwitting agent of sophism, disseminating specious arguments that
appear to be true but which end up misleading the public or
hallucinating it with the false comfort that something is effectively
being done.
 This chapter examines the key factors behind this tokenisation of
development in the news, which we divide into three broad groups:
(a) journalists’ attempts to make poverty and development
newsworthy at the expense of public understanding of them as a set
of critical social issues and policies; (b) the fact that journalists tend
to subscribe, uncritically, to certain ideas predicated by ‘economic
science’ about lifting people out of poverty; and (c) the dominance
of Western worldviews in development discourses, due to journalists’
preference for elite news sources with “authoritative power” who
impose a “tyranny of experts” (Easterly, 2014) and the practical
constraints that they face in accessing alternative voices.

Making poverty newsworthy

The moral hazard and the political threat that poverty poses to
society, and our collective failure as society to overcome inequality in
an age of advanced technology and almost unlimited resources, is
probably the most important story of our time. The fact remains that
the fruits of the most remarkable economic growth in the history of
the world have not been shared equally (Kaplinsky, 2013; Milanovic,
2013; Ravallion, 2001). In countries such as Nigeria (Morales-Pita &
Flynn, 2014) or Vietnam (Bland, 2011; Taylor, 2004), the benefits of
sustained growth have gone to the pocket of a small elite, leaving
behind millions in substandard conditions. In Africa, the number of
people living in poverty did not decline but went up from 200 million
in 1981 to 390 million in 2005. Today over 50% of the people on
that continent live in poverty as defined by the World Bank (2013).
Even in East Asia, where only 20% of the population lives in poverty
nowadays compared to 50% in 1981, this growth has been
accompanied nevertheless by a vast increase in inequality (Knight,
2013; Li, Sato, & Sicular, 2013). In China, for example, the Gini
coefficient – a universally accepted measure of inequality – has
reached the most critical point in its history. Furthermore, to the
amazement of many, the People’s Republic of China or the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam, despite their claims of being socialist, still do
not offer a universal and free healthcare system, while most of their
citizens still have to pay for their children’s primary education
(Blumenthal & Hsiao, 2005; Hsiao, 1995; Ma, Lu, & Quan, 2008).
In that context, common sense tells us that poverty, well-being
and inequality – and the policies and actions that aim to tackle them
– would be a constant source of deep-digging news and analyses in
our media. It would be reasonable to expect that the media, in
assuming its role as watchdog of power, would demand policy
makers deliver tangible, effective results in relation to poverty and
inequality. One would expect that their journalists would be as
thorough and critical in their examination of development policies as
they are in other news areas.
Yet the reality is not only that poverty is largely missing from the
news agenda but also that, whenever it is present, there is relatively
little insightful coverage of these issues (Kim, Carvalho, & Davis,
2010:570) in relation to inequality issues and broader development
policies. Some scholars, such as development economist Jeffrey
Sachs, describes coverage of global poverty as “pretty sporadic” and
laments the absence of media coverage in the US of the UN’s
Millennium Development Goals (Hanrahan, 2009a). Others have
shown that news about development intervention tends to
concentrate on foreign aid, economic growth, infrastructure or Gross
Development Product (GDP) without considering whether, and how,
these elements do or do not reflect what they claim to be in the
context of development discourses (Berger, 2003; Clawson & Trice,
2000; Lugo-Ocando, 2015).
This is not to say that news reporting of development policy has
not improved over the time. In fact, the financial crisis, growing
inequality and the continued existence of poverty have affected how
the subjects of poverty and development have received more
coverage, particularly since 2008. Journalists now appear to be more
aware of the limitations of neoliberal policies promoted by major
development institutions, and the undesirable effects of the
globalisation process, enabled largely by these policies.
Reporting on development policies is more enquiring and deep-
digging now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the first
wave of neoliberal policies rose. News coverage of IMF-led
(International Monetary Fund) austerity programmes or free trade
and deregulation, for example, is more analytical and to some
degree more critical than it used to be. Yet the fundamental question
of which policies can best address poverty and tackle inequality
remains seldom contested in the media, while the ideological
consensus seems to be faithfully reflected rather than questioned in
prevalent narratives, which continue to suggest that economic
growth as the key to development and present national and local
corruptions as the main culprits of the failures of these types of
policies.
Why, then, do we still see so much poor, red-herring news
reporting of poverty and development out there in the news media?
The answer for this is manifold but the very first factor that we need
take into account is the perceived newsworthiness of poverty and
development. To some extent, the relative scarcity of critical
reporting and analysis of poverty in the media might come a surprise
for outsiders: if the scale, scope and impact of an event or issue is a
key traditional factor in determining its newsworthiness (Harrison,
2005; Hartley, 2013; Van Dijk, 2013), then we would expect poverty,
as a structural issue that affects most of the world, to be a prime
candidate for much critical news reporting.
However, the above shows that poverty and anti-poverty policies
do not seem to have the kind of newsworthiness that complies with
the expectations and dynamics in the newsrooms. Poverty, the
biggest story of our time, is often missing from the front pages and
primetime news reports, except when disasters strike and wreak
havoc somewhere. So, for example, famines in Ethiopia or Somalia
are big stories, while policies that address chronic poverty, such as
the rural job creation scheme which the Indian government
implemented in 2005, are not (Kareemulla, Ramasundaram, Kumar,
& Rama Rao, 2013, p. 13).

The focus on events and disasters

In order to understand why, we need to take into account the
dynamics of news production, which plays a pivotal role in defining
the way poverty, and development in general, is reported. One
reason lies in the fact both journalists and the main sources of
development-related news, such as aid providers, tend to prefer
‘uncomplicated’ accounts of concrete events to abstract processes
(Franks, 2013:103). The nature of mainstream journalism practice is
that it tends to deal with events as they arise (Harcup & O’Neill,
2001; Schlesinger, 1987). It is not a practice that lends itself to long-
term trend stories or that is able to study complex topics in depth.
The need to make news accessible and engaging to publics, within
the constraints of the political economy that defines the process of
gathering, producing and disseminating news, leads journalists to
striving for verbal and/or audio-visual narratives that help the public
relate themselves to wider discourses. As such, rather than devoting
space to analysing systemic macro socio-economic trends and
policies, news editors tend to cover daily events and issues defined
by their organisation’s editorial prerogatives. This means focusing on
events that are relevant or interesting for their readers, are of
commercial interest for the outlet, or fall within the priorities set out
by the particular editor of the news day. At any particular point in
time, a few big events tend to dominate the front page, but only for
a short period, after which journalists switch abruptly to the “next
big thing” (Boydston, 2008: 14).
This poses a challenge to the reporting of development,
particularly poverty issues. In this area, big events are usually crises
such as famines, disasters or interventions. Hence, a famine in
Ethiopia goes to the front page because it can be portrayed as a
short-term, dramatic and readily grasped event. Meanwhile, a long-
term project that requires time to structurally address the problem,
despite its potential large-scale positive impact in the long run,
would rarely be reported in the same way. As Susan Moeller writes,
“unless Americans [US citizens] are involved, unless a crisis comes
close to home – either literally or figuratively – unless compelling
images are available, preferably on TV, crises don’t get attention,
either from the media or their audience” (Moeller, 1999: 12). The
same logic applies to news coverage of climate change, which often
focuses excessively on spectacular or extreme events (e.g. melting
ice, abnormal weather, tensions at global climate change summits)
rather than on its disastrous but abstract and distant impacts on life
(such as dislocation, immigration, the loss of livelihoods, severe
poverty and so on) and the need for global policies to tackle these
impacts (Hibberd & Nguyen, 2013). As Berger argues,

Poverty is not just specific news items, but a big-picture

phenomenon, and a corresponding complication for journalism is
that poverty is not an event, but a process. The significance of
this is that it is less easily accommodated in conventional
journalism, let alone researched and constructed. However,
Indian journalist P. Sainath can still say of his reportage: “The
idea was to look at those conditions in terms of processes. Too
often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is,
when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is
about much more than starvation deaths or near famine. It is the
sum total of a multiplicity of factors. That makes covering the
process more challenging and more important.
(Berger, 2003: 4)

Dramatic storylines: Goodies versus baddies

In addition to the focus of dramatic events on the surface of poverty,
Western media have tried other methods to make poverty and
development news relevant and accessible to their primarily Western
audiences – for better or worse. Trade agreements, for example, are
often viewed through the lens of the political process, which focuses
on negotiation among partners instead of examining the potential
consequences of these agreements (Mazumdar, 2011; Servaes,
2013). This is in part because they are covered in the business
pages and/or by political reporters focusing on trade policy as part of
a political agenda. Another common method is to squeeze complex
stories and issues into simple narratives, with the “good guys”, “bad
guys” and a plot that is structured in a particular manner. These
“characters” are indeed essential in the articulation of stories about
development in the news. The characters tend to be “experts” that
form part of what William Easterly calls the “technocratic illusion”
(2014: 6) but they also appear in other forms and shapes. These are
the ‘victims’ – such as the women and children in famines – and, of
course, the villains, who are mostly the ‘corrupt’ and ‘inept’ officials
of developing countries. While these make stories interesting, they
often shy away from critical scrutiny of the deeper layers of poverty
issues and development policies.
In news coverage of foreign aid, for example, the media, instead
of scrutinising how and why aid is spent in certain ways in certain
countries, tend to emulate the same geopolitical agenda that has
long ill-defined villains and heroes in crude terms (Mawdsley, 2008)
to justify the rich’s own game for post-colonial power and influence.
In seeing aid as financial gifts, for instance, journalists direct
disproportionate attention towards making sure that it is in ‘safe
hands’ at the recipients’ end (Easterly, 2002; Knack, 2004; Riddell,
2007). As such, there is a tendency of the media to single out
certain villains and victims – e.g. corrupted governments or
bureaucracy in the developing world – for the failure of foreign aid to
fulfil its promises. Indeed, this viewpoint is faithfully adopted from
the political circle. As well reflected in the following comment by Lee
Herbert Hamilton, a former member of the US House of
Representatives, that was widely reproduced by the media at that
time:

Corruption is indeed a great barrier to success. Aid can work

where there is good governance, and usually fails where
governments are unable or unwilling to commit aid to improve
the lives of their people. We should insist that governments
receiving American aid live up to standards of accountability and
transparency, and we should support countries that embrace
market reforms, democracy, and the rule of law. In return, we
 should guarantee that aid levels will be predictable and sustained
over time – so that governments attempting to do the right thing
can plan prudently.
(Hamilton, 2005)

The “celebritisation” of poverty

On the other hand, the rise of global “infotainment” has led the
media to a tendency to displace the serious with the trivial and
entertaining (Thussu, 2008). One particularly remarkable and
intensifying trend is the focus on the personalities of the people in
leadership positions and the political conflicts within organisations
rather than on broader policy questions. Gaining much momentum
after Robert McNamara was appointed as President of the World
Bank in 1968 (Clark, 1981: 167), this trend has grown more
pronounced in recent times, in parallel to the rise of the celebrity
culture and its increasing power in defining what is news. One
example of this is the reporting of the feud between two economists,
Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly, which got more attention than
the differences in their ideas. The debate between the two became
public when Sachs responded to Easterly’s critical review of his book,
End of Poverty, in the Washington Post in 2001. Easterly prolonged
the debate by defending himself with a rather personal attack on
Sachs. Easterly supporters – such as Dambisa Moyo, the author of
Dead Aid (2009), a book that calls for an end to foreign assistance
to Africa – jumped onto his bandwagon to become overnight the
darling of the US right-wing media. Equally relevant are the
interventions of celebrities such as Irish singer Bono, who on the
one hand calls for foreign aid to those in poverty but, on the other,
publicly defends the tax evasion scheme of Ireland (Neate, 2014).
The focus on celebrities does not mean that the debates are
deprived of ideology. On the contrary, celebrities tend to be used in
the media narratives to represent a particular ideological stance. In
the specific case of the Sachs-Easterly debate this was framed in the
news as part of the broader left-right battle over the role of
government (Pryke, 2014). Thus, Sachs and advocates of more aid
were portrayed as pushing for big government while Easterly and
Moyo tend to represent the side that sees government as part of the
problem. However, at the end of the day, these celebrity debates are
counterproductive because they are divorced from reality and, as
such, oversimplify or obscure the challenges and problems that
poverty poses.
Another consequence of this personality-driven news is that it
diverts public attention from critically important events or issues of
the day. In 2007, accusations against the then President of the World
Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, who was alleged of impropriety in handling his
girlfriend’s promotion at the institution over which he presided (Cole,
2007), received more coverage than the bank’s far more
questionable general amnesty programme policy. Under this policy,
private firms that had defrauded the World Bank in the past would
not be penalised so long as they admitted their wrongdoing. In
essence, it offered an amnesty to private companies, NGOs and
individuals who had stolen or defrauded the bank, a criminal act in
itself, if they fully disclosed past malpractice and promised “to stick
with the rules” in future. In other words, organisations that had
been caught red-handed in corruption would receive a mere slap on
the wrist and be allowed to continue business as usual. Rarely did,
however, the media question why the World Bank was allowing
criminals, who had stolen money originally destined for those in
poverty, to be let off the hook. Instead, most of the media, being too
busy with the above personal scandal of Wolfowitz, gave little
coverage to this particular issue and, where they reported on it,
merely amplified the institution’s version through that superficial “he
said, she said” formula, as is exemplified in the following excerpt
from a BBC news story:

Under the new scheme, they could bid for work on future World
Bank funded schemes if they meet strict criteria. World Bank
boss Paul Wolfowitz said it would “prevent and deter corruption”.
The World Bank says it is trying to tackle corruption and weak
 governance, seeing it as a major obstacle to economic
development in the world’s least developed countries.
(BBC, 2006)

Another example is the way in which the rape indictment against the
head of the IMF and French presidential contender, Dominique
Strauss-Kahn, was covered by the media in 2011. While the media
concentrated on his personality, the effects that his resignation had
on policy making in the IMF and in particular in relation to the debt
negotiation with Greece in the summer of that year received short
shrift. The poor extent to which the press understands these
institutions is illustrated by an article in New York Magazine, which
stated that Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s job as president of the IMF
was that of a “figurehead” or “ambassador” with a “big staff to take
care of the day-to-day politics” (Grigoriadis, 2011).

The ‘cult of economics’

Another prominent feature of development news that readers might
have found from the above is the prevalence of economically
focused multilateral organisations and institutions such as the World
Bank and IMF. In a sample of news stories from 2011 to 2015 on
poverty in Africa, 30% have the World Bank as the main source
while only 10% have the United Nations and merely 4% the World
Health Organization. The strong attention to economically focused
institutions reflects not only the high level of legitimacy that they
enjoy among journalists, but also their focus on economic
development more than anything else in their news coverage of
development – which leads us to another key contributor to the
tokenisation of development in news discourses: newspeople around
the world have over the years accepted tacitly ‘economic growth’,
rather than things like improvements in health and well-being, as the
rational response to and best panacea for poverty.
An exact science?
The ‘economic growth’ paradigm shapes many journalists’
presumptions about development and serves as a theoretical
explanatory framework for what they can see and hear on the
ground. This, to a large extent, is because “the conventional
approach to development, to making poor countries rich, is based on
a technocratic illusion: the belief that poverty is a purely technical
problem amenable to such technical solutions as fertilizers,
antibiotics, or nutritional supplements” (Easterly, 2014: 6). By
presuming development as a technical economic problem, journalists
assume that it has to be solved by ‘economic scientists’, who are
seen as technocrats who can create and use objective expert
knowledge to solve an issue through economic solutions. The
problem lies in the underlying assumption that economics is a
science based on broad consensuses in the same way as, for
example, physics on gravity or geography on the fact that the earth
is not flat.
Of course, economics is not a science in the sense applied to the
natural sciences. Regarded by some as a social science that comes
out of a long tradition of positivist thinking both on the right and left
of the political spectrum, economics studies and tries to predict how
people and their organisations behave in dealing with the scarcity of
resources, not with pre-existing phenomena of the universe. As
such, economists can neither propose nor prove hypotheses as
universal laws of nature like physicists, chemists or biologists. Their
findings are prone to the influence of complex non-economic factors
that are impossible to be fully accounted for in any single study, such
as culture or the political system.
This is not to dismiss economics in relativist or postmodern terms
but to highlight that the validity and applicability of economic
research findings should be received with a broad degree of
scepticism in any given context. The ‘economic science’ is not there
to tell us what the future will be for all of us but to provide multiple
explanations of society, which might contradict with each other, even
when they are based on the same data. There is no such thing as a
universal agreement among economists, even in seemingly clear-cut
situations such as the end of the Cold War. Indeed, if there is one
thing all economists agree upon, it is the fact that there is no
agreement among them (Ahlers & Lakonishok, 1983; Alston, Kearl, &
Vaughan, 1992; Frey, Pommerehne, Schneider, & Gilbert, 1984;
Fuller & Geide-Stevenson, 2003).

“Kicking the ladder”

Despite this, many mainstream journalists reporting development
somehow assume that there is an overall agreement and universal
approach to what needs to be done for poor countries to develop.
For many in the newsroom, there exists an underlining principle to
distinguish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ development paradigms. In their
worldview, developed countries are rich and wealthy because they
undertook certain technical approaches and follow specific policies.
In this sense, the economy is seen in naturalist terms – i.e. as a
phenomenon that has a life of its own and that follows certain
objective rules. Countries that follow these rules and succeed are
therefore ‘authorised’ in the media to provide guidance and advice to
poor countries. Added to this is the fact that these ‘enlightening’
countries are the key aid donors of development programmes; hence
they hold power over them. This is why Western experts are the
primary definers in news about development. Although the policies
these experts advocate are deeply driven by ideologies, journalists
accept them as ‘objective truth’ on the basis of what they see as the
West’s success. Consequently, such experts are authorised to provide
what is presented nevertheless as a ‘detached and objective’
assessment of what needs to be done.
This coverage tends to ignore the fundamental dichotomy
between what these policies advocate based on the Western
experience and what that historically experience has in fact taught
us. As Ha-Joon Chang (2002) succinctly explains, the history of
economic development is that of some countries getting at the top
of the ladder by a certain path and then telling those at the bottom
to do something different. This “kicking the ladder” phenomenon, as
Chang (2003) calls it, applies to all area of expert advice to
developing countries such as free trade, copyrights, industrial policy
and deregulation of labour markets, among others (Chang, 2002).
Not surprisingly, this paradigm for news on development is riddled
with fundamental flaws and inconsistent empirical evidence. For
example, no single neoliberal development policy recommended by
multilateral banks or the IMF can claim to have successes beyond
the micro level and when this happens, it is often under very specific
circumstances (Clemens, Kenny, & Moss, 2007; Townsend & Gordon,
2002). The stories of Western Europe, China and South Korea since
World War II, which are among the most successful economic cases
of modern history, are ones of protectionism, high levels of
regulation, intensive manufacturing and industrialisation,
employment through public expenditure, big bureaucracies and a
vast social net to protect the poor. These policies are, however,
precisely the opposite of what experts advised Latin American
societies during the debt crisis in the 1980s and, indeed, what rich
countries have been forcing the whole developing world to do to join
the globalised market.
Even in China and the so-called Asian Tigers, held by many as
examples of beneficiaries of free trade and free markets, the
historical evidence is mixed and far from conclusive. Contrary to
prevalent news narratives about their successes, these nations
adopted for years strong protectionist policies and offered huge
amounts of subsidies to their industries and agriculture (Boestel,
Francks, & Kim, 2013; Leipziger, 2001; Wade, 1990). Even Chile
under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, then the darling of the
right, often considered a neoliberal ‘success’ in Latin America,
practised market regulation and protectionism on a great scale,
including offering state subsidies to a large part of its economy
(Negoita & Block, 2012; Schurman, 1996).
In light of these flaws, one might ask why the media remain so
adamant with the above worldviews. Why do their stories keep
reflecting and repeating such non-existent ‘universal truths’ about
development? Why do they allow such worldviews to go uncontested
despite being constantly proven wrong? The simple answer, which in
itself represents another contributor to the tokenisation of
development in the global media, is that journalists, for practical and
ideological reasons, depend too much on and often confer legitimacy
to powerful Western sources and their ideas and ideologies.

Dominance of Western worldviews

It is widely acknowledged that Western media dominate the global
news flow and play an important role in establishing and reinforcing
the West-led geopolitical order (Paterson, 2005: 145). The global
news agenda about international development is not beyond such
dominance, which in itself translates into a series of directives that
lead development news to being framed and modelled in accordance
with the interest of the rich and the powerful. As scholars have
demonstrated over the years, journalists have a tendency to merely
reflect the conventional wisdom and ideas of a limited range of
powerful sources (Altheide, 2004; Mason, 2007; van Trigt et al.,
1994). This is because, as Herbert Gans (1979) demonstrates in
Deciding What’s News, journalists choose news sources on the basis
of their proximity, familiarity and ability to provide sound bites. To
this list we add the perceived ‘authoritative power’ of news sources,
which plays a central part in the shaping of development news
discourse.

Authoritative power to speak

In his work on leadership, James M Burns (1978) explains that
power and authority are two different yet interrelated elements in
society. Power, he said, is the result of combining will with resources,
while authority is achieved by legitimacy. One, he argued, can have
power without authority – as in the case of the military juntas in
South America of the 1970s or authority without real power, such as
the Pope. However, journalists as a professional group tend to select
news sources that display ‘authoritative power’; that is, they often
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Ja hän otti kaksi palloa hienonnettua lihaa ja viskasi ne maahan
niin tuimasti, että koko puoti lihasiruilla pirskottui.

Nyt kiivastui lihakauppias Tshing niin ankarasti, että joka kohta

hänen ruumiistaan aina kiireestä kantapäähän hehkui hillittömän
raivon tummaa tulta. Hän sieppasi jyrsityn luun ja temmelsi ympäri
puodissansa.

Mutta Lo Ta oli jo ulkopuolella puotia.

Naapurien ja ostajain joukko, joka ei uskaltanut hänelle sanaakaan

sanoa, kasvoi hetki hetkeltä ohikulkijoista, jotka uteliaina pysähtyivät
katsomaan. Mutta majatalon vartia seisoi kauhistuneena samalla
paikalla räystään alla.

Nyt syöksyi Tshing puodista ulos lihakirves oikeassa kädessä ja

vasen kohotettuna aikomuksessa tarttua Lo Tan. Mutta tämä painoi
käden alas, pyöräytti lihakauppiaan melkein ympäri ja kaatoi hänet
yhdellä ainoalla potkauksella selälleen maahan. Astui sitten askelen
lähemmäs, nosti toisen jalkansa Tshingin rinnalle, tarttui toisella
kädellä hänen kumpaankin käteensä ja tuijottaen tuimasti Tshingia
kasvoihin sanoi:

— Minä olen uskollisena soturina paIvellut vanhaa

kaupunginpäällikköä Jen Ngam'issa ja saanut palkinnoksi häneltä
arvonimen "läntisen rajan suojelija". Mutta mikä oikeus on sinulla
sellaiseen arvonimeen sinä vaivainen mato ja naisten kiusaaja?
Kuinka olet sinä uskaltanut niin raa'asti sortaa Tsui Lien parkaa?

Ja Lo Ta löi häntä nenään, niin että se vääntyi vinoksi, turposi ja

alkoi vuotaa verta. Kun lihakauppiaasta oli mahdotonta nousta
pystyyn ja kun kirveskin oli pudonnut hänen kädestään, hän
huudahti:

— Piru vieköön, se oli oivasti osattu.

— Konna! — huusi Lo Ta, — vai uskallat sinä vielä puhutella

minua noin ylimielisesti?

Ja hän löi lihakauppiasta toistamiseen, tällä kertaa yläpuolelle

silmää.

Muut pelkäsivät Lo Taa niin suuresti, etteivät uskaltaneet

sekaantua asiaan, vaikka säälivätkin poloista lihakauppiasta.

Tämän täytyi pyytää armoa.

— Suus kiinni! — ärjyi kapteeni — Jos olisit viimeiseen saakka

pysynyt lujana, niin voisin antaa sinulle anteeksi, mutta koska vikiset,
et ole armoa saava.

Ja hän löi kolmannen kerran häntä ohimoon. Mutta kun hän näki
vastustajansa hievahtamatta ja hengittämättä makaavan maassa,
hän luuli tämän teeskentelevän ja huusi:

— Jos sinä, lurjus, tahdot tekeytyä kuolleeksi, annan minä sinulle

vielä yhden sivalluksen!

Mutta lihakauppiaan kasvojen väri alkoi kalveta ja Lo Ta ajatteli

itsekseen: »Hitto vieköön, minä kun luulin antavani tuolle pakanalle
terveellisen opetuksen enkä saattanut aavistaakaan, että hän
kolmesta kolauksesta kuolla kupsahtaisi. Saattavatpa ottaa minut
kiinni ja viskata tyrmään. Paras lienee siis kiireimmän kautta korjata
luunsa.
 Hän kääntyi vielä kerran lihakauppiaan ruumiiseen päin ja sanoi:

— Sinä tekeydyt hengettömäksi, jotta minä jättäisin sinut rauhaan,

mutta kyllä minä vielä näytän sinulle…

Näin itsekseen toista morkaten hän lähti tiehensä eikä yksikään

Tshingin naapureista tai palvelijoista uskaltanut häntä pidättää. Lo Ta
riensi suoraa päätä kotiin, kokosi välttämättömimmät vaatteensa,
varasi vähän rahaa kukkaroonsa, otti nuijan käteensä ja katosi
eteläisen portin kautta kaupungista kuin savu liedestä.

Tshingin ystävät koettivat sill'aikaa saada tätä henkiin, mutta kaikki

osottautui turhaksi. Ei ollut mahdollista, että tuo poloinen enää
tekeytyisi kuolleeksi; hän oli todella kuollut, murhattu. Sitten he
riensivät viranomaisten luo ilmottamaan tapahtumasta.

He tapasivat pormestarin raatihuoneessa, jossa tämä otti heidän

ilmotuksensa vastaan voimatta omalla vastuullaan antaa käskyä
vangita Lo Ta, koska tämä kuului kaupunginpäällikön vartiaväestöön.
Pormestari astui kuitenkin heti kantotuoliinsa ja riensi
kaupunginpäällikön virastoon. Tavallisten puheillepääsytoimitusten
jälkeen hän pääsi sisään ja esitti asian kaupunginpäällikölle, joka
kauhistuneena sanoi:

— Vaikka Lo Ta on vartioväestöni kunnollisimpia kapteeneja, en

voi kieltää vetämästä asiaa oikeuden käsiteltäväksi. Hän palveli jo
isääni, joka sitten siirsi hänet minun käytettäväkseni. Mutta koska
hän näyttää olevan syypää murhaan, niin voitte vangita hänet, vetää
oikeuteen, ja jos hänet todistusten perusteella tuomitaan syylliseksi,
jätän isäni ratkaistavaksi, minkä rangaistuksen hän on saava. Isäni
voisi muuten lähettää ajamaan häntä takaa siinä tapauksessa, jollei
häntä kiinni saada.
 Pormestari lupasi seurata näitä neuvoja ja poistui. Saavuttuaan
takaisin virkahuoneeseensa hän ryhtyi heti kaikkiin toimenpiteisiin
kapteenin kiinniottamiseksi. Poliisipäällikkö sai vangitsemiskäskyn ja
läksi liikkeelle mukanaan kaksikymmentä miestä. Nämä etsivät joka
loukon La Tan käskynalaisessa kaupunginosassa, mutta eivät
löytäneet häntä, eivätpä edes jälkeäkään hänestä. Sitten he sulkivat
hänen isännöitsijänsä vankityrmään ja etsivät pakolaista kaupungin
ympäristöstä aina penikulman taajuudelta. Sekin turhaan. He
palasivat kaupunkiin ja vangitsivat vielä pari Lo Tan naapuria, jotka
he yhdessä Lo Tan isännöitsijän kanssa veivät pormestarin
tutkittaviksi. Tämä määräsi pitämään heitä vielä vangittuina,
tuomaan Tshing vainajan ystävät ja naapureja kuulusteltavaksi ja
kutsumaan oikeuden viranomaiset kokoon, jotta asian käsittely
voitaisiin lopullisesti alkaa.

Näin kului päivä eikä murhaajaa saatu käsiin. Sitä seuraavana

päivänä käskettiin lähettämään kaikkialle kuulutuksia, joissa kuvattiin
hänen muotonsa ja luvattiin tuhat kashi-rihmaa sille, joka voisi jättää
Lo Tan oikeuden käsiin tai antaa edes sellaisia tietoja, että hänet
niitten avulla saataisiin vangituksi.

Lo Ta rupee munkiksi.

Sillä välin oli Lo Ta paennut yli mäkien ja halki laaksojen kauaksi

Wei Tshoun kaupungista eikä hän hiljentänyt vauhtiaan ennenkuin
tiesi pari kolme »kreivikuntaa» jättäneensä taakseen.

Nälkäinen ei valikoi ruokia, ei paleltuva vaatteita eikä köyhä

vaimoa naimisiin mennessään. Yhtä vähän harkitsee pakolainen,
mitä tietä olisi riennettävä eteenpäin. Eikä Lo Ta, kiihottunut kun oli,
välittänyt vähääkään siitä, missä oli ja minne kulki. Siitä päivästä,
kun oli lähtenyt pakoon, hän harhaili lähes kuukauden koditonna
pitkin maakuntia.

Eräänä päivänä hän saapui Jen Mun nimiseen kaupunkiin, joka ei

ole kaukana Kiinan suuresta muurista, viivähtääkseen siellä jonkun
aikaa seutua katsellen. Kaupunki oli jotakuinkin suuri; oli hevosia,
vaunuja, kauppapuoteja ja tavaroita yllin kyllin, ja vaikka se oli vain
hien-kaupunki, näytti se komeammalta useita fu- tai tshou-
kaupunkeja. [Hien on piirikunnan pääkaupunki, fu ja tshou ovat
suurempia kaupunkeja, joiden vallan alle kuuluu useampia
piirikuntia.]

Kun kapteeni Lo Ta nyt verkalleen asteli kaupungin katuja pitkin,

hän huomasi erään kadun kulmauksessa suuren joukon ihmisiä
lukemassa seinään naulattua julistusta. Hän tunkeutui väkijoukon
läpi lähemmäksi julistusta kuullakseen, mitä siinä seisoi, sillä hän ei
osannut itse lukea.

— Tämän kaupungin päämies, — luki eräs joukosta, — on saanut

Wei Tshousta seuraavan käskyn: »Kuulutettakoon paikkakunnalla
heti, että Wei Tshoun kaupunginpäällikön vartioväestön kapteeni
nimeltä Lo Ta, joka on murhannut lihakauppias Tshingin mainitusta
kaupungista, on vangittava. Se, joka rikoksentekijän salassa
pysymistä avustaa tai antaa hänelle yösijaa, katsotaan rikokseen
osalliseksi ja kanssarikolliseksi, mutta se, joka hänet kiinni ottaa ja
jättää oikeuden käsiin tai antaa hänen olinpaikastaan ensimäiseksi
tiedon viranomaisille, saa tuhat kashi-rihmaa palkinnoksi» j.n.e.

Lo Ta oli kuunnellut juuri tähän saakka, kun joku hänen takanaan

kuiskasi: — »Hyvä veli, vai olette tekin täällä!?», tarttui häneen ja vei
hänet väkijoukosta pois.

Kun Lo Ta kääntyi ympäri katsomaan, kuka häneen kävi käsiksi,

hän hämmästyi aika lailla nähdessään edessänsä Kin-vanhuksen,
jonka oli tavannut siellä Wei Tshoun juomalassa.

Vanhus johti hänet ensin syrjäiseen paikkaan ja sanoi sitten:

— Hyväntekijäni, te olette kovin rohkea! Ettekö kuullut, että sille,

joka teidät ottaa kiinni tai antaa ilmi, luvataan tuhat kashi-rihmaa?
Miksi piti teidän mennä niin lähelle julistusta? Jollen minä kaikeksi
onneksi olisi teitä huomannut, niin olisitte voinut joutua poliisin käsiin.
Teidän ikänne, muotonne ja pukunne on selitetty tarkoin
julistuksessa.

— En tahdo kieltää teiltä, — vastasi Lo Ta, — että minä teidän

asianne johdosta menin sinä päivänä jolloin Wei Tshousta lähditte,
lihakauppias Tshingin luo' Me jouduimme riitaan ja minä lähetin
hänet kolmella iskulla tästä maailmasta. Sen tehtyäni minä tietysti
karistin Wei Tshoun tomut jaloistani. Ja noin kolme, neljäkymmentä
päivää vaelsin senjälkeen maita ja mantereita, kunnes vihdoin osuin
tänne. Entä te? Kuinka olette joutunut tänne! Tehän läksitte silloin
Hai Fungiin?

— Hyväntekijäni, — vastasi Kin, — kun olitte minut ja minun

tyttäreni vapauttanut, nousimme ajopeleihin matkustaaksemme
tosiaankin Hai Fungiin. Mutta silloin juolahti mieleemme, että se
roisto voisi lähettää ajamaan meitä takaa ja ottamaan kiinni ja meitä
alkoi sentähden pelottaa, kun meillä ei enää ollut turvaa
hyväntekijästämme. Siitä syystä läksimmekin toiseen suuntaan,
pohjoiseen. Jonkun matkaa ajettuamme me sattumalta tapasimme
erään vanhan tuttavan, joka palasi asioiltaan kaupungista, ja tämä
toi meidät tänne. Eikä siinä kaikki. Hän ei antanut itselleen rauhaa
ennenkuin oli naittanut tyttäreni ensimäiseksi vaimoksi erään rikkaan
miehen, sihteeri Tshau'n pojalle. Nyt on meidän varsin hyvä
ollaksemme, mistä meidän on kiittäminen teidän oikeaan aikaan
suomaanne apua, jalomielinen hyväntekijämme. Tyttäreni on usein
kertonut vanhalle sihteerille teidän hyväsydämisestä
osanottavaisuudestanne. Tämä on suuri miekkailun ystävä ja hän on
useasti maininnut tahtovansa kernaasti kerran mitellä voimiansa
teidän kanssanne. Mutta siihen meillä on ollut kovin vähän toiveita.
Tulkaa, hyväntekijämme, pariksi tai kolmeksi päiväksi
vieraaksemme, niin saamme neuvotella, miten olisi teidän
asemaanne nähden meneteltävä.

Lo Ta lähti Kin-vanhuksen mukana sihteerin taloon. Kun he olivat

saapuneet perille, nosti vanhus sisäkäytävän oviverhon ja huusi:

— Tyttäreni! Meidän hyväntekijämme on täällä!

Kun tyttö tämän kuuli, niin tuli hän esille yllään korea puku ja
runsaasti koristeita ja pyysi Lo Taa käymään sisälle. Sitten hän
kumarsi kuusi kertaa tulijan edessä, ikäänkuin olisi jotakin jumalaa
rukoillut, ja virkkoi:

— Ilman teidän hyväntahtoista apuanne en minä nyt olisi täällä.

Ja hän pyysi tulijaa vielä kerta käymään sisään, nousemaan

ylikerrokseen ja istuutumaan.

— Miksi nämä muodollisuudet… — väitti Lo Ta vastaan. —

Lähdenpä mieluummin eteenpäin.

Mutta vanha Kin ei ottanut sitä kuuleviin korviinsa.

 — Koska nyt kerran olette vieraanamme, ette saa niin pian lähteä.
— Ja hän otti Lo Tan matkamyssyn ja nuijan ja korjasi ne talteen.
Sitten hän sai kapteenin nousemaan ylikertaan ja käski tytärtään
pitämään seuraa vieraalle, sillä aikaa kun hän keittää riisiä.

— Se on toki liikaa!… — huudahti Lo Ta. — Kai on sittenkin paras,

että minä sanon teille hyvästi.

— Herra kapteeni, — vastasi vanha Kin — me emme saattaisi

elämällämme maksaa sitä palvelusta, jonka te meille osoititte! Miksi
puhuttekaan mitättömästä vaivasta valmistaa teille vähän syötävää?

Ja tytär piti seuraa kapteenille ylikerroksessa, sillä välin kun isä

kutsui palvelusväen kokoon ja jakeli sille määräyksiään. Toiset saivat
toimekseen tehdä tulen lieteen, toiset seurasivat vanhaa Kiniä
kaupungille ostamaan tuoretta kalaa, lintua, hedelmiä y.m. Sitten
valmistettiin tulojuoma ja ateria. Pöytä katettiin kolmelle hengelle,
kullekin kupponen ja syömäpuikot, sitten toi tyttö hopeisen maljakon
ja kaasi juomaa kupposiin, minkä jälkeen isä ja tytär heti tarttuivat
kupposiin osottaakseen vieraalle jumalallista kunnioitustaan.

— Mitä tämä polvistuminen merkitsee? — huusi Lo Ta. — Te

tapatte minut sillä!

— Hyväntekijämme, — vastasi vanhus, — minä kirjotin nimenne

punaiselle taululle, me olemme aamuisin ja iltasin suitsuttaneet
pyhää savua sen edessä ja osottaneet sille jumalallista kunnioitusta.
Mutta tänään on hyväntekijämme omassa personassaan meidän
keskuudessamme. Miksi emme siis saisi hänelle tehdä samoin?

— Kautta kunniani, — virkkoi Lo Ta, — teidän nöyryytenne ja

kiitollisuutenne menee yli kaikkien rajojen!
 Kaikki kolme ryhtyivät nyt syömään ja hörppivät vähänväliä
kupposistaan.

Tuli ilta.

Yhtäkkiä kuului ulkoa portailta melua, ja kun Lo Ta avasi akkunan

katsoakseen ulos, näki hän pari-, kolmekymmentä nuijalla asestettua
miestä, jotka huusivat:

— Luovuttakaa se mies meille! Luovuttakaa se mies meille!

Räyhääjäin joukossa oli vanhanpuoleinen mies hevosen selässä

ja tämä komensi heitä vaikenemaan:

— Älkää rähiskö! Älkää rähiskö! Varas saattaa pujahtaa

käsistänne!

Kun Lo Ta huomasi uhatun asemansa, sieppasi hän käteensä

huonekalun ja riensi portaita alas. Mutta vanha Kin seurasi häntä ja
viittilöiden käsillään huusi hänelle:

— Näitten miesten tähden ei teidän tarvitse kättänne nostaa!

Sitten Kin kiiruhti hevosen selässä istuvan miehen luo ja kuiskasi

hänelle jotakin. Tämä alkoi nauraa ja antoi miehille käskyn poistua,
jota nämä heti seurasivatkin. Mutta itse hän astui alas hevosen
selästä ja tuli sisään.

Vanha Kin pyysi taas Lo Taa nousemaan ylikertaan. Mutta kun tuo
uusi tulokas kapteenia katseli, lankesi hän heti polvilleen ja lausui:

— Suokaa anteeksi, herra kapteeni, ja ottakaa vastaan minun

erinomainen kunnioitukseni teitä kohtaan.
 — Kuka tämä herra on? — kysyi Lo Ta isä Kiniltä. — Minulla ei ole
ollut kunniaa aikaisemmin tavata häntä. Miksi hän polvistuu
edessäni?

— Tämä herra, — vastasi Kin, — on tyttäreni appi, herra sihteeri

Tshau. Hän erehtyi ja luuli teitä toiseksi henkilöksi ja toi varalta
muutamia työmiehiä mukanaan. Mutta kun minä hänelle kerroin,
kuka te olette, niin hän lähetti miehet matkoihinsa.

He nousivat ylikertaan ja Kin käski tuoda juotavaa ja ruokaa lisää.

Sihteeri osotti Lo Tan kunniasijalle, koska piti häntä sen arvoisena.

Mutta Lo Ta epäsi:

— Minä en rohkene suostua esitykseenne.

Sihteeri pakotti kaikesta huolimatta Lo Tan istumaan

kunniapaikalle, koska he muuten eivät voisi osottaa hänelle
kunnioitustaan, ja jatkoi:

— Minä olen usein kuullut puhuttavan teidän urhoollisuudestanne

ja nyt suo taivas minulle armon nähdä teidät omassa
personassanne. Pidän tätä elämäni suotuisimpana sattumana.

— Minä olen vain sivistymätön mies, — sanoi Lo Ta, ja sitä paitsi

syypää murhaan. Mutta hyvä on, herra sihteeri, jollette karkota
minua talostanne, vaan ehkäpä tiedätte neuvoakin, mitä minun
pitäisi tehdä.

Sihteeri iloitsi ja tiedusteli lihakauppiaan murhaa. Sitten kääntyi

keskustelu toisiin asioihin ja vähitellen he tietysti joutuivat
miekkailuun, koska tämä oli kummankin mieliharrastus.
 Aika oli kulunut sydänyöhön, kun vihdoin käytiin levolle.

Seuraavana aamuna sanoi sihteeri Tshau kapteenille:

— Minä pelkään, ettei teillä tässä paikassa ole riittävää turvaa.

Ehkä herra kapteeni sentähden tahtoisi jonkun aikaa asua minun
maatalossani?

— Onko se kaukanakin? — kysyi Lo Ta.

— Kolmen (Kiinan) penikulman päässä, — vastasi toinen, —

seudulla, jota nimitetään »seitsemäksi jalokiveksi».

— Enhän minä sen parempaa voi toivoakaan, — arveli Lo Ta.

Sihteeri Tshau lähetti miehen noutamaan maatilaltaan parin

hevosia, joilla he ajaisivat sinne, ja vielä ennen päivällistä sanoi Lo
Ta hyvästi Kinille ja hänen tyttärelleen.

Kun he olivat saapuneet perille, vei sihteeri vieraansa taloon ja

pyysi häntä istumaan vierassijalle ulkokatoksen alle. Sitten isäntä
käski tuoda juotavaa, teurastaa lampaan, ja valmistaa
vierashuoneen illaksi. Kestitystä jatkui seuraavanakin päivänä
entiseen tapaan.

— Herra sihteeri, — sanoi Lo Ta, — te olette liian vieraanvarainen

ja ystävällinen minua kohtaan. Minä en voi hyvyyttänne milloinkaan
palkita.

— Me olemme veljiä kaikki, — vastasi sihteeri, — kaikki, jotka

asumme neljän meren välissä. [Vanhan kansantiedon mukaan oli
Kiinan asema sellainen.] Miksi puhuttekaan sellaisen joutavan teon
palkitsemisesta?
 Näin kului viikko. Kun he eräänä päivänä istuivat lukuhuoneessa
keskustellen kaikenlaisista asioista, saapui vanha Kin suurella
kiireellä maataloon ja riennettyään suoraa päätä sihteerin ja
kapteenin luo sanoi:

— Olen hyvin pahoillani, että minun täytyy ilmottaa hyväntekijälleni

ikävä tieto. Kuten muistatte, erehtyi herra sihteeri silloin teidän
suhteenne ja otti varovaisuuden vuoksi työmiehiä mukaansa. Vaikka
nämä heti poistuivatkin, kiihtyivät naapurimme ja ihmisten mieliin jäi
sittenkin epäluuloa. Nyt on viime yönä meidän läheisyydessämme
nähty poliiseja, jotka ovat hyvin tarkasti tutkineet kaikki paikat.
Pelkäänpä, että he saattavat vielä tulla tännekin ja vangita meidän
hyväntekijämme, jos saavat vihiä asiasta.

— Koska asian laita on sellainen, — arveli Lo Ta, — pitänee tästä

taas tarttua matkasauvaan.

Mutta sihteeri Tshau tuumi:

— Jos minä pidätän kapteeni Lo Tan täällä näitten olosuhteitten

vallitessa, niin pelkäänpä, että tästä voi syntyä yhteentörmäys, joka
voi raivostuttaa kapteenin. Toiselta puolen, jos minä annan vieraani
lähteä talosta, niin täytyy minun hävetä sitä itsenikin edessä.

Ja hän jatkoi ääneen:

— Minulla olisi ehdotus sijottaa teidät toiseen paikkaan, herra

kapteeni, ja sen kautta tulisitte vaikka koko ikänne turvatuksi
pienimmältäkin vaaralta. Mutta en tiedä, liekö se mieleenne.

— Koska minä, — vastasi Lo Ta, — olen kuoleman ansainnut, niin

miksi vastustelisin, jos kerran voin löytää sellaisen paikan, missä
saan rauhassa kallistaa pääni lepoon!

— Siinä tapauksessa on ehdotukseni mitä soveliain teille, — selitti

Tshau. — Noin kymmenen penikulman päässä täältä on vuori
nimeltä »Viiden taulun vuori» ja sen huipulla on Wan Shu Jen-
luostari, jossa asuu noin kuusi-, seitsemänsataa munkkia. Tämän
luostarin johtaja Tshi Tshin on minun paraimpia ystäviäni. Jo isoisäni
teki lahjotuksia luostarille ja minä olen sen suojelijoita. Joku aika
sitten sain luvan hankkia sinne oppilaan, mutta tähän päivään
saakka en ole tavannut luotettavaa henkilöä, jonka hyödyksi voisin
täyttää aikomukseni. Jos te, herra kapteeni, olette valmis lähtemään,
suostun maksamaan kustannukset. Sanokaa siis minulle suoraan,
tahdotteko ruveta munkiksi?

Lo Ta harkitsi itsekseen:

— Koska minun nyt täytyy lähteä täältä, niin kenen luo voisin
paeta?
Enpä todellakaan tiedä muuta mahdollisuutta.

Ja hän vastasi Tshaun kysymykseen:

— Koska te, herra sihteeri, olette niin ystävällinen, että teette

minulle tällaisen tarjouksen, niin tahdon mielelläni ruveta munkiksi.
Mutta joka tapauksessa minun täytyy turvautua teidän johtoonne ja
opastukseenne, sillä minä olen hyvin heikko sellaisissa asioissa.

Tällä tavoin se asia siis ratkaistiin ja seuraavana yönä varustettiin

matkaa varten kaikki tarpeelliset tavarat, kuten vaatteita ja rahaa
sekä lahjoja luostarille.
 Varhain seuraavan päivän aamulla tuotiin kantotuolit esiin, joissa
sihteeri Tshau ja kapteeni Lo Ta kannettiin Viidentaulunvuoren
luostariin.

Kun he kello yhdeksän tienoissa saapuivat luostarivuoren juurelle,

lähetettiin mies edeltäpäin ilmottamaan heidän tulostaan ja he
seurasivat sitten verkalleen kantotuoleissaan hänen jälkeensä.
Luostarin kyökkimestari ja lukkari olivat jo vastaanottamassa, kun he
astuivat kantotuoleistaan, ja johtivat tulijat luostarin edustalla
sijaitsevaan kesämajaan.

Kun luostarin johtaja, Tshi Tshin, oli saanut kuulla, keitä vieraat
olivat, hän tuli apulaisensa ja palvelijainsa seuraamana lausumaan
sihteeri Tshaun ja Lo Tan tervetulleiksi. Nämä molemmat kumarsivat
hyvin syvään johtajalle, joka kysyi:

— Meidän arvoisa suojelijamme ei varmaankaan saapune

missään vähäpätöisessä asiassa niin kaukaa tänne luostariimme?

Sihteeri vastasi:

— Ei suinkaan. Minulla olisi vain pienoinen asia, jolla pyytäisin

saada vaivata teitä.

— Olkaa hyvät ja käykää minun huoneeseeni, — pyysi johtaja Tshi

Tshin, — niin saamme puhua asiasta ja juoda teetä.

Sihteeri Tshau astui ensimäisenä sisään ja Lo Ta seurasi häntä.

He saapuivat johtajan huoneeseen. Kun tämä pyysi sihteeriä
istuutumaan kanssaan kunniapaikalle, etsi Lo Ta itselleen paikan,
johon voisi istahtaa levähtämään, ja paneutui johtajan
mietiskelypaikalle. Mutta sihteeri kutsui hänet heti luokseen ja
kuiskasi hänen korvaansa:

— Muistakaa, että tulette palvelemaan täällä munkkina. Te ette siis

saa luostarin johtajan läsnäollessa istuutua.

— Sitä minä en tiennyt, — vastasi Lo Ta anteeksipyytävästi ja

asettui sihteerin viereen seisomaan. Ja hän antoi katseensa
harhailla samaan suuntaan kuin luostarin johtaja ja sihteeri
apulaisen, lukkarin, kyökkimestarin, sairaanhoitajan,
taloudenhoitajan ynnä muitten seistessä kahdessa rivissä luostarin
johtajan ja hänen vieraansa edessä ja vaihtaessa silmäyksiä
keskenään.

Sillä välin oli sihteerin palvelija tuonut lahjoja sisältävän laatikon

sisään, ja levitteli niitä nyt luostarin johtajan eteen, joka huudahti:

— Mistä syystä näin paljon lahjoja? Olen vakuutettu, että me

taaskin olemme aiheuttaneet teille hyvin paljon vaivaa.

— Ne ovat vain vähäpätöisyyksiä, joista ei ansaitse kiittää, —

sanoi sihteeri.

Munkit ja palvelijat korjasivat nyt lahjat syrjään. Senjälkeen nousi

sihteeri ja lausui:

— Minä tahtoisin esittää luostarin johtajalle asian. Olen jo pitkän

aikaa aikonut hankkia tänne kustannuksellani alottelijan, jota varten
jo kaikki on ollut tähän saakka valmiina, mutta tätä ennen en ole
onnistunut pääsemään tarkotukseni perille. Nyt tapasin sattumalta
tämän sukulaiseni nimeltä Lo, joka sotilaana on alkanut
elämänuransa. Mutta tultuaan tuntemaan julkisen elämän raa'at
tavat heräsi hänessä halu vetäytyä siitä pois. Minä pyydän
sentähden armollista johtajaa kirjottamaan hänet vähäpätöisen
suojelukseni alaisena luostarin kirjoihin, jotta hän voisi ruveta
munkiksi ja astua tämän pyhän temppelin palvelukseen. Kaiken
edesvastuun ja kaikki kustannukset otan osalleni. Pyydän
toimittamaan asian mitä pikimmin.

Kun luostarinjohtaja oli kuullut tämän pyynnön, vastasi hän:

— Minä pidän meidän talollemme kunniana vastaanottaa teidän

ehdotuksenne. Se tulee käymään helposti. Mutta täällä olisi teetä!
Olkaa hyvä!

Kun tee oli juotu, kutsui johtaja apulaisensa neuvottelemaan Lo

Tan munkiksi rupeamisesta ja käski kyökkimestarin pitää huolta
kasvisateriasta. Sen jälkeen neuvottelivat luostarin ylimmät
virkamiehet salaisesti keskenään ja tulivat siihen tulokseen, ettei Lo
Ta lainkaan näytä maailmaan kyllästyneeltä. Päinvastoin, hänen
silmissään oli uhmaa ja ylpeyttä. Ja he sanoivat sairaanhoitajalle:

— Mene pitämään seuraa vieraille, jotta me saisimme vielä harkita

asiaa.

Hoitaja nousi paikaltaan ja pyysi sihteeriä ja Lo Taa astumaan

vierashuoneeseen. Mutta luostarin johtajan apulainen esitti sillä välin
omasta ja toistenkin puolesta johtajalle, että tämä mies, joka nyt
tahtoi ruveta munkiksi, näytti kovin väkivaltaiselta ihmiseltä. Hän oli
kopea ja katsannoltaan villin näköinen, ja he neuvoivat sentähden
kaikissa tapauksissa kieltämään häneltä pääsyn, jottei luostari
myöhemmin joutuisi kärsimään hänen tähtensä.
 — Mutta hän on meidän suojelijamme, sihteeri Tshaun sukulainen,
— virkkoi johtaja, — emmekä me voi suvaita, että hänen harras
aikomuksensa tulisi näin kevytmielisen arvelun tähden kumotuksi.
Minä sanon teille kaikille, että voitte pelotta luopua epäilyksestänne.
Mutta odottakaa hetkinen, kunnes olen vielä harkinnut asiaa.

Näin sanoen johtaja sytytti suitsutusastian, nousi

mietiskelypaikalleen, nosti jalkansa ilmaan, luki rukouksen ja vaipui
sitten jonkunmoiseen tiedottomuuteen, kunnes suitsuaminen oli
sammunut. Senjälkeen hän tuli taas tajuihinsa ja sanoi munkeille:

— Antakaa hänen ruveta munkiksi! Tämä mies on kuin tähti

taivaalla. Hänellä on rehellinen sydän, mutta vaikka hän nykyään
onkin vaikeasti johdettavissa ja hänen mielenlaatunsa on itselleen
epäsuotuisa, muuttuu hän vähitellen hartaaksi, ja hän on tekevä
hyviä töitä. Kukaan teistä ei tule saavuttamaan hänen suuruuttaan.
Muistakaa minun sanani älkääkä missään tapauksessa vastustako
hänen pääsyään.

— No niin, — sanoi apulainen, — jos kerran johtajamme ottaa

hänet suojelukseensa, niin emme me saata tehdä mitään muuta kuin
noudattaa johtajamme mieltä. Me voisimme vain esittää
vastaväitteitä, mutta koska hän ei ottaisi niitä kuuleviin korviinsa, olisi
se turhaa.

Nyt kutsutti luostarin johtaja sihteerin ja muut läsnäolijat luokseen

aterialle. Senjälkeen kirjotti lukkari luettelon, ja kun sihteeri Tshau oli
suorittanut maksut, annettiin taloudenhoitajalle toimeksi
munkkipuvun hankkiminen. Seitsemässä päivässä piti kaiken olla
suoritettu. Vitkastelematta johtaja valitsi onnellisen päivän ja
suotuisan hetken juhlamenoja varten.
 Kun oli juhlamenojen määrä tapahtua, soitettiin kelloja ja
päristeltiin rumpuja, ja koko luostarin väestö kokoontui johtajansa
käskystä lakihuoneeseen. Munkit, joita oli runsaasti puolisen tuhatta
ja jotka olivat puetut juhlakasukkoihinsa, asettuivat kahteen riviin
totuudenistuimen eteen. Sihteeri Tshau kantoi hopeaisen lahjansa
esiin, asettui istuimen eteen osottaen sille jumalallista kunnioitusta ja
ilmotti pyyntönsä.

Sitten opasti eräs palvelija Lo Tan istuimen eteen. Apulainen käski

tämän riisumaan päähineensä ja jakoi vihittävän tukan yhdeksään
osaan, jotka oli määrä leikata. Tuossa tuokiossa ajoi hiustenleikkaaja
pään putipuhtaaksi ja kävi viiksiin ja poskipartaan käsiksi. Lo Ta
siihen tyytymättömänä virkkoi:

— Jättäkää toki edes vähäsen jälelle!

Töin tuskin saattoivat munkit pidättää nauruaan. Luostarinjohtaja

lausui istuimeltaan:

— Olkoon suuri tai pieni, lyhyt tai pitkä, keritse kaikki, jottei kukaan
saattaisi komeilla eikä kerskata.

Kun johtaja oli näin ilmaissut ajatuksensa, hän lisäsi vielä:

— Aja kaikki puhtaaksi!

Partaveitsi upposi Lo Tan partaan ja hetkessä muuttui hänen

päänsä sileäksi kuin lanttu.

Sitten astui apulainen munkkikirje kädessä istuimen luo pyytäen

uudelle alottelijalle munkkinimeä. Johtaja vastasi kahdella säkeellä:
 "Pilven peittämä tähti on kuin jalokivi kaivannossa;
Kautta Fo'n ikuisen lain olkoon Syvähenki hänen nimensä."

Niin sai alottelija uuden nimensä, jonka luostarin kirjuri merkitsi

munkkikirjeeseen jättäen tämän sitten Lo Tan omiin käsiin. Kun
kaikki tämä oli tapahtunut, puettiin Lo Tan ylle hänen uusi
munkkipukunsa, lukkari talutti hänet lain istuimen eteen ja
luostarinjohtaja laski kätensä hänen päälaelleen antaen Lo Tan
tehdä seuraavan pyhän lupauksen:

Ensiksi: Sinun täytyy olla Buddhalle kuuliainen.

Toiseksi: Sinun täytyy kunnioittaa johtajaasi ja veljiäsi.

Kolmanneksi: Sinun täytyy noudattaa veljeskunnan säädöksiä.

Nämä ovat ne kolme velvollisuutta ja sitoumusta, joiden lisäksi tuli

seuraavat viisi kieltoa:

Ensiksi: Sinä et saa tappaa.

Toiseksi: Sinä et saa varastaa.

Kolmanneksi: Sinä et saa tehdä alhaisia tekoja.

Neljänneksi: Sinä et saa nauttia väkijuomia.

Viidenneksi: Sinä et saa valehdella.

Lo Talla eli — kuten hänen nimensä nyt kuului — Syvähengellä ei

ollut aavistustakaan näistä käskyistä, joita hän nyt sitoutui
noudattamaan, ja kun häneltä kysyttiin, voisiko hän pitää kaiken
tämän pyhänä, hän vastasi hätäisesti:
 — Kyllä… tietysti… minun pitää vielä tuumia…

Lo Tan vastaus huvitti munkkeja taas aika lailla.

Juhlamenojen päätyttyä kutsui sihteeri Tshau munkit luostarin

ruokasaliin ja antoi heille juhlapäivällisen — tietysti kasvisaterian —
ja kullekin pienen arvon mukaisen muistolahjan. Kyökkimestari
kuljetti Lo Taa ympäri, jotta tämä voisi osottaa veljilleen kunnioitusta,
ja vei hänet sitten makuusuojaan, jossa oli alttarin ja Buddhan kuvan
edessä rivittäin mietiskelytuoleja munkkeja varten. Eräälle näistä piti
Lo Tan istua.

Yö kului rauhallisesti ja seuraavana aamuna sihteeri Tshau kääntyi

vielä kerta ennen lähtöään luostarinjohtajan ja veljien puoleen
sanoen:

— Herra johtaja ja te veljet! Minä pyydän teitä pitämään silmällä

Syvähenkeä, minun sukulaistani, joka on luonteeltaan jonkun verran
uskalias ja äkkipikainen. Jos hän jossakin kohden rikkoo luostarin
hyviä tapoja vastaan, tapahtukoon se sitten puheessa tai teossa, niin
pyydän vielä teitä, huomioon ottaen minun mitättömän
suojelijaoikeuteni, suomaan hänelle anteeksi ja olemaan häntä
kohtaan niin kärsivällinen kuin suinkin.

— Herra sihteeri Tshau, — vastasi tähän luostarinjohtaja, — te

voitte tämän asian tähden olla aivan rauhassa. Mitä opetukseen ja
käytökseen tulee, olen minä itse opastava häntä, enkä minä epäile
lainkaan, ettei hän vähitellen oppisi lukemaan pyhiä kirjoja,
laulamaan hymnejä ja harrastamaan hengen viljelemistä.

— Minä toivon, — lupasi Tshau, — että minulla vastedes tulee

olemaan tilaisuus palkita teidän hyväntahtoisuutenne arvokkaalla