Jan Culik

(A Czech version of this article is available here in Britske listy.)

It is often said that, compared to the writing of the more professional newspapers in the West, even allegedly "highbrow" media in the Czech Republic are substandard. Most of their news reports are too short, too superficial or too muddled.

As a result, people living in the Czech Republic who rely on information from the Czech media have the feeling of living behind an opaque screen. Information from the outside world reaches them only in distant, confusing reverberations. No wonder the Czechs do not know what is going on around them and in the world.

Let me take you on a tour through two articles to show you what I mean.

Last week, the United Nations published its annual report on human development. Coincidentally, both the British daily newspaper The Guardian and the most widely read Czech daily with high brow aspirations, Mlada fronta Dnes, each published an article dealing with this issue. (Mlada fronta Dnes appeared one day later.)

The articles were of a similar length, thus providing a welcome opportunity to analyse how news is treated by both a leading British and a leading Czech daily newspaper.

On Monday 12 July, The Guardian published the following:

On Tuesday 13 July, the Czech daily Mlada fronta dnes (MFD) published the following (the author's numbered remarks are given at the bottom of this article):

Let us then look at some detail at the differences between The Guardian and the MFD coverage of this topic.

The writing of the Czech journalists is sloppy and verbose. Also, they seem to be trying very hard to avoid saying anything simply, directly and clearly. They are always searching for the most circuitous and complicated way of expressing themselves.

Note that at the beginning of the article, The Guardian uses concrete information (facts about the three richest families in the world) and then draws general conclusions.

How does MFD deal with this topic? Let us look at some of the numbered point I have noted in the text.

1. MFD is excessively interested in rich people without trying to understand the reasons which lead to wealth creation and without being able to consider actions which could stimulate wealth creation. Its interest in the rich countries of the world is superficial and tabloid. The Guardian notes (not at the beginning of the article) that Canada is seen as the most advanced country of the world from the point of view of the human development index, but it ignores the countries in the second and third place. MFD is primarily interested in who is rich.

The Guardian is primarily interested in who is poor and in the drastic, ever-growing gap between the rich and poor in today's world - which is, in fact, the main thrust of the UN human development report. The Guardian seems, at least in this instance, to view reality from a decent, humanist standpoint. Mlada fronta Dnes manipulates the reader using various tabloid tricks and does not seem to adhere to any general values.

2. In the relativist environment of the Czech Republic, facts are undermined: there is no respected authority. This is seemingly very pleasant because people do not need to follow any rules. (In fact, it is very unpleasant and politically and economically destructive.)

MFD casts doubt on the very validity of the report in the second line of its article:

"This is at least what is maintained by yesterday's UN report..."

3. Czech journalists are quite obsessed by what the world is allegedly thinking about the Czech Republic. It is quite logical, then, that the information about how the Czech Republic has fared in the UN development report is given straight away, in the third sentence of the MFD article, as the second most important piece of information (immediately after we have been told who is the richest in the world.)

The Guardian, a British paper, does not tell its readers about the position of Great Britain until the sixteenth sentence, in the ninth paragraph of the article. The Guardian regards other information - a global view, an anticipation and an analysis of world trends - as more important than "who has won."

Czech journalists do love metaphors, especially if they are cliched. They use such metaphors to introduce an implicit emotional context into their reporting. In the examined article, there is one instance of this practice.

MFD writes that "The Czech Republic has... bettered itself by three rungs..." on an imaginary ladder. The Guardian simply states that "The UK has moved up four places in the table."

5. Czech journalists frequently replace the objective word "Czech" with the emotionally charged, implicitly nationalist "ours." Like the constant concern about "what the world thinks of us," this creates an impression of defensiveness: we Czechs have defensively huddled together and we look out, vigilantly, from the crowd of our people at the hostile "foreign world."

MFD:

Of the East European countries only Slovenia overtook us..."

The Guardian:

"The UK has moved up four places in the table to number ten, beating France into 11th place..."

MFD characterises the UN report in too many words:

"The report, which is published by the United Nations regularly every year, takes as a point of departure the data on how people in the individual countries live: how their health and education are taken care of, how much they earn or perhaps how many years men or women will probably live to see, and a lot of other information, which taken together speaks about lifestyle and the quality of life."

The Guardian just calls it a "human development report."

7. The sentences between references (6) and (7) are empty padding. Rhetorical questions such as the following are superfluous:

"And so what, in fact, then is life on earth like, especially since, in October, already the number of its inhabitants will exceed six billion? Do people live better on earth or the other way about?"

The quotation from Richard Jolly is useless - it repeats what was said earlier:

"It is the aim of the report in the current debate on globalisation to lay emphasis on human worries and interests, not to concentrate only on financial flows."

Compare it with The Guardian quote from Richard Jolly. What he says there is related to his words in MFD, but it is expressed more clearly:

"The world is rushing headlong into greater integration, driven mostly by a philosophy of market profitability and economic efficiency. We must bring human development and social protection into the equation."

8. Only a third of the way through does MFD finally reach what should have been the main point of the whole article - and should have been in the first sentence or in the title:

"Throughout the whole world the gap between the rich and poor is broadening relatively quickly"

Compare the headline in The Guardian: "UN attacks growing gulf between rich and poor"

It is comical when MFD writes that "the gap between the rich and poor is broadening 'relatively quickly,' since as The Guardian says, the ratio between the richest and the poorest 20 percent of the worlds population was 30:1 in 1969, 60:1 in 1990 and now is 74:1.

Czech authors are afraid to speak freely and openly - somebody might take offence. Thus, they need to put qualifiers into their statements so that, if confronted, they can wiggle out of their statements and say that they did not mean it, really.

9. Now comes MFD's forte: the presentation of statistics. The authors of the MFD article get lost in the statistics and confuse the reader:

"The richest two hundred people of the world are getting ever richer: only between the years 1994 and 1998 they doubled their wealth. 'They have more money than is the sum of the incomes of the poorest 40 percent of the world's population,' says Jolly."

Compare how the same data are presented by The Guardian:

"Over the last four years, the world's 200 richest people have doubled their wealth to more than $1 trillion. The number of people living on less than a dollar a day has remained unchanged at 1.3bn."

MFD presents its information in confusing terms. The Guardian is clear, because it gives the concrete incomes of the richest and the poorest people.

It is also important that The Guardian gives the statistics in digits.

If you need to present several numbers in a single sentence, it is obvious that writing "40, 112 and 250" is clearer than "forty, one hundred and twelve and two hundred and fifty."

10. This is also a problem with the next MFD formulation. Apart from the general opaqueness and numbers given in words, the reader will stumble over superfluous little words such as "for instance":

"The differences in incomes between the five richest countries and the fivesome of those poorest - African - states, which, for instance, in 1960, were at a ratio of thirty to one, have grown in 1997 to seventy four to one."

Why "fivesome"?

Let us compare it with a formulation from The Guardian:

"Thirty years ago, the gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest stood at 30 to 1. By 1990, it had widened to 60 to 1 and today it stands at 74 to 1."

11. The next part of the MFD article is an "information tornado," as the Czech Prime Minister would undoubtedly put it. The reader is bombarded with irrelevant data. He or she will switch off.

"Only what Tanzania (which is on the whole in the 156th place) pays in interest for its earlier loans exceeds by nine times its expenses on healthcare and four times the sums devoted to elementary schooling. Only one fifth of the world's population lives in the countries with the highest incomes, and at the same in these countries, 86 percent of the world gross domestic product and 68 percent of direct foreign investment is produced. And they control 74 percent of all telephone lines on the planet, as well as 97 percent of patents, existing in the world.

The report uses statistics to show that for instance high income is not always a necessary condition for the condition of women in society. The Czech Republic, Slovenia and the Bahamas offer better conditions for women than could be expected according to their incomes. This is according to the report an illustration of the fact that "equality may be achieved in varying cultures". Only 33 countries in the overall number of 174 recorded an annual growth of at least three percent per capita in 1980 - 1996.

During this period per capita growth fell in 59 countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and in the former communist countries, including the former Soviet Union. Among other things, the report also deals with organised crime. It estimates that the world illegal trade with drugs achieved a turnover of about $ 400 bn in 1995, which is more than the share of iron, steel and car industry in the world. One of the possible indices of the quality of life is also tourism: if tourist exchange concerned 260 million people in 1980, in 1996 it was already 590 million.

As the Reuters agency has noticed, even in the framework of rich countries there exist considerable disproportions. For instance if life expectancy in Denmark is 76 years, thirteen percent of the Danish population will not live to see the age of sixty. In Ireland 23 percent of the inhabitants are functionally illiterate and in the super rich United States almost one fifth of the population lives below the local poverty level. After all, Britain, Ireland and the USA indicate a higher share of poor people than the other industrialised countries."

This reminds one of the good old days of the Communist regime, when the government also spouted out statistics in order to confuse, to make it impossible to clearly evaluate trends. This is like education in Czech schools: we know how to memorise facts, but we do not know how to organise them to show what they mean.

The only mention of the current information revolution and its impact on the economy in MFD is this:

"The richest part of the world now already lives fully by the information revolution, which again is for those poorest countries almost inaccessible. Several numbers speak eloquently about this: in 1930, a three minute telephone call from New York to London cost 245 dollars (in 1990 dollars), but last year's price was only 35 cents."

Is the decrease of telephone charges without any further explanation really the most important thing to say about the current situation?

Let us compare this passage with The Guardian:

"Breakthroughs like the internet can offer a fast track to growth, but at present, only the rich and educated benefit. Of the net's users, 88 % live in the west, says the report, adding: 'The literally well connected have an overpowering advantage over the unconnected poor, whose voices and concerns are being left out of the global conversation.'"

13. MFD includes this single, factual sentence which does not analyse anything, or anticipate future developments:

"Among other things, the report also deals with organised crime. It estimates that the world illegal trade in drugs achieved a turnover of about $ 400 bn in 1995, which is more than the share of iron, steel and car industry in the world."

Let us compare this with The Guardian:

"Among the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation are criminals, who can now exploit world wide markets for drugs, arms and prostitutes.

Underworld bosses now command organisations with the global reach of multinational companies, and six major international crime syndicates are believe to gross $1.5 trillion annually from the proceeds of crime.

'They are now developing strategic alliances linked in a global network, reaping the benefits of globalisation,' the report warns."

14. The information about which bureaucrat wrote the UN report, how the report is compiled, the number of copies and in how many languages it is published (!) is irrelevant. This passage is reminiscent of television news under Communism which perfunctorily informed the viewer that "the government was in session today..."

A reporter should be able to select information and interpret it.

The MFD authors moved the crux of the report into the middle of their article, although it should have been at the top of it; they hid the main information among irrelevant, disorientating details and ignored the reason why the UN had published the report in the first place. They have not asked themselves why they actually bothered to write up this article. Perhaps only because it was on the wires?

MFD has failed to mention any of the recommendations of the report. In order to learn about these, we need to refer to The Guardian. MFD has not even noticed that the UN recommends the setting up of an international legal centre for business negotiations of poor countries in the international business arena, although such legal aid would undoubtedly be very helpful for the contracting economy of the Czech Republic.

This is what The Guardian has written and what MFD has omitted:

"To counter the downside of globalisation, the UN makes a number of recommendations, including an international forum of business, trade unions and environmental and development groups to counter the dominance of the G7 in global decision making; a code of conduct for multinations" and the creation of an international legal centre to help poor countries conduct global trade negotiations."

I have warned time and again in Britske listy that serious international debate on many topical issues, anticipating future trends and possible developments - even catastrophic ones - never makes it into the Czech Republic. People live there in their own happy little isolated world.

Newspapers such as MFD are capable of carefully removing all the important information from a news report, so that the reader remains in a happy ignorance.

On publication of the above article in Czech in Britske listy, I received the following reader's comment:

"Why are you always complaining, Mr Culik? In comparison with (the Czech daily) Lidove noviny, Mlada fronta Dnes's article about the UN human development report was quite brilliant.

We, here, in the Czech Republic, have other priorities. On 14 July 1997, Lidove noviny, the Czech intellectuals' newspaper, advertised its main forthcoming themes, which included:

Karel Gott [an aging Czech pop-music crooner] and the last sixty years of Czech history

The Mir space station can fall to Earth

Sharon Stone - the famous actress does not want to be just a sex symbol.

Journalist O. Stindl writes on page 1 of Lidove noviny in an article, entitled 'Gott mit uns... and we are with him':

'Even in the contemporary Czech Republic the singer Karel Gott is a major authority of the 'great world' towards which everyone must define his or her stance.'

Further advertised topics due to be published in the highbrow Lidove noviny for the summer include:

Ever more Czechs travel to Thailand for sex/Many Czechs seek out Thai prostitutes because they do not require a condom/A report from the sexual paradise in South East Asia

Jan Culik, 18 July 1999

The author is the publisher of the Czech Internet daily Britske listy.

Other Articles by Jan Culik in CER:

Press Freedom under Threat, 12 July 1999

Corruption at the Czech Law School, 5 July 1999

The Czech Malaise, 28 June 1999