Mulling it over: Jeff McMullen

By Jano Gibson October 27 2002

Do you think as a journalist, seeing a lot of the problems that happen around the world, that it creates a stronger sense of understanding of what’s going on out in the world?

Yeah, I think a life of observing brings you a certain part of the journey. But for me I did get to a point in life where documenting another tragedy was not going to be enough. I always felt I had to measure what was the impact of the film.

If I went to Guatemala for 4 Corners and made a film about genocide, that isn’t enough. But if the film is shown, as it was, to a Congressional Committee that then takes a vote and decides not to send the helicopters to the genocidal army, then the film has actually communicated something that matters. Not merely to be something between the commercials of a big selling machine called television, which is what most television is used for.

So for me my work as a journalist, while its increased my knowledge and awareness of the problem, at the same time I’ve been testing my own values on this and saying, “yeah, but how much am I doing about it, how much am I contributing?”

I am not Mother Teresa, but I really do believe you can find the patch and you can get to work on it. You really can start something in your own community. I’m doing that a lot since walking away form daily kind of reporting. I’m using the same skills but I’m actually trying to make some things happen now.

The media on the one hand has the capability to share with the world some of the issues that are facing deprived people around the world, but on the other hand do you think it desensitises people in the West to some of these issues? Has the whole empathy to people who are starving in Africa or anywhere, has that kind of dropped away, do you think, in more recent times?

Yes, curiously McLuhan’s “global village” hasn’t really made us more aware. There isn’t more empathy. In fact the way the media projects the so called “third world”, as it’s called, as if it’s “another”, it’s a “separate” kind of part of humanity, instead of really being capable of seeing that it is connected, that it is part of us. That’s what that version of the global village has done.

And I use that metaphor of the matrix, that it seems to me that we’re inside this bubble, and what is projected inside the bubble is very limited. It doesn’t really make us feel that this is our responsibility, that this is part of our own human family.

On the other hand, the media, we are the historians of the day. We are the people that have the responsibility, the opportunities, to go out and see really how things are.

The question then is, how do you tell the story in an effective way so that it impinges? How do you shatter the matrix?

Sometimes certain key events do that. I think September 11 2001; Bali – the Bali bombings for Australians. Suddenly its come home that the world is in a troubled state. And if the media uses that time to try and get in to the complexity of things.

I think foreign correspondents are doing that all the time. We understand that if you’ve been reading the full coverage of a good foreign correspondent, you know why these people are on the boats, you also know they are not a terrorist threat, and you can also develop a view of what our government policy is towards them. So there is a huge responsibility to get it right.

I think the media generally - this is a huge generalisation I’m going to make - it’s a big selling machine. It is actually used more to sell stuff, all kinds of stuff, and one of those items, news, information, even the truth actually, is just another commodity in that big selling machine. That may sound like Noam Chomsky. But the more I’ve seen, the more I think he’s closer to an appraisal of how we actually use this extraordinary technology. It isn’t really about revealing, you know, the true state of things, it is partly about selling us things that keep us comfortably numb in the matrix.

You mentioned about events such as September 11 bringing the horror back to home of some of the issues that we face. And during your speech you talked about how indigenous people here in Australia are suffering. Can you share a little bit of what you’ve experienced on your recent investigations in the northern parts of Australia?

Well, in the 1960s as a very young reporter, I went with some Aboriginal communities. In my 20 years at the ABC I did some reporting in that area. On 60 Minutes it was the very first story I did on 60 Minutes. It was about central Australian Aboriginal petrol sniffing and the problems of dislocation in the communities.

Thirty years later I can go back to the same communities and see that the health of Aboriginal Australia is worse than it was before all this money was thrown at the problem. You know, what Australia is saying is, well, you know “we’ve given money. It’s their fault. It’s somebody else’s fault.” We haven’t asked ourselves, if it hasn’t worked, did we go about it the right way?

What I see when I go to the communities and I’ve been up in the Northern Territory, is that we have never really asked the Aboriginal people how they want us to help. We haven’t listened. We’ve come in like either missionaries or people that were convinced that we knew what was best for these people.

And plainly we’ve got it all wrong. On any way you want to measure it, the health of Aboriginal Australians has gone backwards in that 30-year period. And now you have a situation where I didn’t meet many men my age because the life expectancy is twenty years less than it is for a white Australian.

That’s a clear example that even while we have our mind on terrorism, and all of these international threats, right here in our own society we have neglected something. And the scale of this, compared to what I know in Africa, on another project I work on in Africa, where you’ve got these incredible numbers. Forty million African orphans by the end of this decade. You have tens of millions of people with HIV AIDS. You’ve got places that have been torn apart by decades of conflict, poverty, environmental ruin.

Here, in Australia, we should have, for a powerful, affluent country, we should have a grip on this, on this urgency that’s in the Aboriginal communities. And I don’t think the media has found a way to impinge because the general community feels we’ve done enough. We’ve tried. It’s hopeless. It isn’t. There are communities there that are transforming themselves. It’s not a story that really comes through.

We’ve become numb to that as well. There is amnesia about that particular problem. On the issue of hunger, we have hunger here in the lucky country.

Activism or activist is a term usually associated with some kind of anti-globalisation anarchist, or a Greenpeace activist hanging off a crane somewhere. But here they were talking about “investor activism”. What do you think of the reappropriation of that concept?

Well, its just action to me. This is cast as … The Hunger Project projects this approach as you become a stakeholder in ending poverty and that the reward for that kind of investment is for you to know that you are contributing towards building, really, a civilised world.

Personally, I think the job of the moment is so challenging. The task ahead is so dangerous and daunting that you’re almost a fool not to do something. In some way choose your own path in which to do it, but if you don’t, we will inherit an even more dangerous world. Children will face challenges far beyond what we do. Its going to compound because of the problems plainly because we are going to jump from 6 billion to 8 billion people in less than 25 years. The water supply, we will cross that threshold of available fresh water. So how are you going to invest in security and safety? You’ve got to pick. You’ve got to say are you going to throw barbed wire around Australia? Are you going to get a tougher coast guard? Are you going to spend more money on defence? None of that will greatly transform the world or make it safer, more peaceful, a better future for our children. But if you choose strategically, if you like, not out of morality but out of self-interest if you want to be blunt about it, you could say that this approach is a kind of activism. Or a kind of investment that brings very clear results. You will see that if you visit those places the measurable difference.

I don’t cringe at the thought of activism, because even the list you’ve mentioned, whether it’s Amnesty International or Greenpeace, it all makes sense to me. It is actually a way of getting through to large numbers of people, and showing that you can transform the world.

I think you do have tremendous power individually to change anything. If you want to change a few things or change the whole damn world you do have to look at your value system. The more I’ve known, the more I’ve seen, I’m convinced. Pick a patch and get to work on something you know you can do.

And one final question that’s kind of related. The WTO is coming to Australia in the next couple of weeks, and there is obviously going to be a lot of protests. Is there anything that you’d say to protesters?

Well, I am hugely supportive of peaceful, civil disobedience, demonstration. In my view, I’ve noticed that in that long tradition of the Berrigans, Martin Luther King, all the way back to Thoreau. Throw in Ghandi.

I became mistrustful of some protests covering the moratorium during the Vietnam War. I saw demonstrations lose control and they become all the things that they are opposed to. I’m not going to give advice. I’m going to say this has been my experience. People who spend the energy and commitment to go and really try and change the world in that way through protest should be commended. But you’ve got to be careful that you don’t deny someone else an alternate view on it.

And it’s a tricky area because globalism on the one hand can be a saviour as much as it can be a curse. And some of these things aren’t clear-cut. In Africa at the moment you’ve got roughly 13 million people on the edge of starvation. And we’re having a very complicated debate about whether you send genetically modified food, you know, grain. I don’t think that’s as clear-cut as either side makes out because I’ve stood with hungry people in villages.

So when you rush to the barricades, you’ve got to be thoughtful. That’s all. There’s a great tradition of doing that well and that in itself is action that makes people then think about it, I think. If it ends up being yet another spasm of violence, you undermine all the real benefits of action. Then it’s just another sideshow in a violent world.