by Hasan Ferdous
Bangladesh has an “image” problem, and it’s not a pretty one. Foreign newspapers and electronic media, while referring to Bangladesh, usually add a prefix to identify it: the most corrupt country, the most polluted country, the most impoverished country, etc. Our government leaders – and some intellectuals of mixed stripes — love to brand such epithets as “foreign conspiracies” and kick them right under the carpet. Sitting in their comfy chairs, it is so easy for them to close their eyes and turn on Zee-TV. As, here comes O. Rai!

Since I live outside Bangladesh, my situation is a little different. Each time I introduce myself as a Bangladeshi, I have to be watchful about that little smirk, that slowly fading grin, on people’s faces. They don’t have to say, I just know what is behind that smirk.

Last month, at a meeting in San Jose, California of Bangladeshi engineers and architects, we were confronted with a simple question: what can the non-resident Bangladeshis (NRBs) do to improve Bangladesh’s image? My task was to look at the question from the media’s perspective and come up with some suggestions. For good or bad, here are my thoughts, organized in six questions and answers.

#1: How is the image of a country formed and what is the media’s role in it?

The image of a country, much like reputation of a company or of an individual,
is the sum total of people’s perceptions about it. It takes years for these
perceptions to form and are not easy to erase. To use an expression made
popular by Walter Lippman, these perceptions are like pictures in our head. One
single picture – or perhaps one single word – serves to symbolize an entire
country or people. We say Hollywood and one immediately thinks of scantily clad
gorgeous women. We say Germany and pictures of sturdy, super efficient
automobiles come to one’s mind. One says Soviet Union and we see pictures of
Gulags and Red Square.

There are several ways these perceptions are created, but the primary vehicle
through which they are conveyed is the media: newspapers, TV, radio, and,
increasingly, the internet. Our dependence on the media for information, as
well as for the validation of our firmly held beliefs and concerns, is almost
absolute. Today’s media, especially the so-called mainstream media, usually
speaks with one voice: they repeat the same stories, convey the same images and
thus work together, what Noam Chomsky so famously said, to manufacture consent.
In other words, to create uniform views. Not that there isn’t any alternative
source of information, but the mainstream media is so strong, so unified and so
global that almost everything else becomes of little or no consequence. It is
somewhat like your neighbourhood convenience store competing with Wall-Mart.
Or, as in the case of the movie “You got mail,” it’s Tom Hank’s million dollar
book store vs. Meg Ryan’s family bookshop. Of course, we all remember what
happened to Meg Ryan. She had to sell her bookshop and crawl into Tom Hank’s
bed.

Now, in most cases, the images that the mainstream media conveys, is not
divorced from reality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They are all based on
hard facts and portray everyday reality. However, the images they project are
always selective and thus can convey only a partial truth. It is somewhat like
a photographer’s lens. In choosing its focus, a photographer selects a
particular angle, a particular view, and excludes everything else. What he
records is true, but it is not the only truth, not nearly the whole truth.

Whether one agrees or not, creating a single-image portrait of a nation serves
very subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, political purposes. Consider the case
of American blacks. There is nothing wrong, statistically speaking, in stating
that every third or fourth black American has at one point of their life been
behind bars. When this statistical truth is repeated—and frequently laced with
stories of rape, murder and domestic violence— what in the end remains is the
picture of a criminal nation. The fact that blacks are also America’s best
athletes, artists and religious leaders is easily forgotten. Similarly, the word
“fundamentalist” is used by the American media in a manner that it is always
associated with a Muslim. Many Muslims are fundamentalists and some of them are
perhaps terrorists. But the clever use of the images links the three and
succeeds in establishing a fallacy: all Muslims are fundamentalists and hence
terrorists.

#2: What is Bangladesh’s image outside Bangladesh?

Recently I did a simple polling among my colleagues. Some 16 people from six
countries responded to a single question I had posed: what image does come to
your mind when you hear the world Bangladesh? In order of popularity, these are
the images they chose: over-population, poverty, natural disaster, corruption,
democratic Muslim country and, one person said, green countryside.

I guess this was a rather imperfect polling but still produced a fairly
realistic result. To make it slightly more scientific, I did a Google search,
using a few key words. The results are as follows:

• Poverty (686,000 hits)
• Over-population (650,000 hits)
• Violence (493,000 hits)
• Democracy (394,000 hits)
• Corruption (269,000 hits)
• Fundamentalism (13,900 hits)

These single-images, no matter how real or close to reality they might be, are
enough to give us shudders. Last year, after Bangladesh for the third time
topped the honor-roll of Transparency International as the most corrupt country
in the world, my daughter, then in the 12th Grade, came home and asked me, with
a glum face: is it true that Bangladesh is the worst country in the world? My
younger daughter, who is in the 4th Grade, was so distraught when she read in a
UNICEF flyer that Bangladesh was the world’s poorest country that she refused to
go on trick or treating for UNICEF.

My own humiliation with Bangladesh’s image problem had a different take. I was
watching TV with a room full of people. Actress Roseanne Barr, who is rather
overweight, was doing a stand up comic. She said, she was checking with her
doctor the other day on losing weight. The doctor said, go spend a month or so
in Bangladesh. The whole room erupted in a deafening laughter. It took me some
time to understand what was so funny. In fact, what she meant was that
Bangladesh is so dirt poor and famished that if Roseanne could spend a month
there, she would starve herself to a curvy kitten.
Ever since Henry Kissinger had described Bangladesh a “bottomless basket”, that
epithet, repeated ad nauseum by the western media, has remained stuck with
Bangladesh, something like a bad cough. In the US media, whenever someone needs
to prove that America is sliding through a downward chute, Bangladesh is fished
out as a good example of “rottenness”. Malnutrition is on the rise among the
American blacks; their longevity is declining. What measure does one use? Of
course, compare it with Bangladesh. The situation in New York’s Harlem is so
despicable that its child mortality rate is among the highest in the world.
Which comparator do you use? Again, Bangladesh, as does the New York Times.
The quality of Sydney’s drinking water has dramatically fallen. What is the
bottom line? The Times reports, it is perilously close to Dhaka’s water
quality.

#3: Does Bangladesh’s image correspond to its reality?

Last month, after Bangladesh was called the most corrupt country in the world
for the fourth time, Shishir drew a cartoon in Prothom-Alo. He drew an apple:
perfectly shaped outside, full of little bugs inside.

I don’t think he drew it right. The apple that Bangladesh is is rotten both
inside and out. We know Bangladesh is poor, we know it is corrupt, we know it
persecutes its own minority, and we know fundamentalism in Bangladesh is on the
rise. That’s a reality and nobody knows that better than us.
But Bangladesh is a lot more than what these images portray. The country is
poor, but it is also a heroic nation that faces nature’s cruelty with utmost
courage. Poor governance and military dictatorships have lashed at it for too
long, but the people have refused to give up, never failing to summon courage to
rally for democracy. Nurturing old traditions, it has produced great music and
art. The economy is anything but moribund, and the garment labels to be found in
New York’s best department stores prove the point. Activism and work in the
non-governmental sphere, such as by Grameen Bank, are examples for the rest of
the world to emulate. None of this will ever become headlines in the Western
media. Paula Zahn is not interested. If there is a problem with the western
media’s treatment of Bangladesh’s image, this is it.
#4: Is the media to be blamed for Bangladesh’s poor image?

No, the media is only the carrier of the message. You can’t blame the mirror
for the image it reflects. If we break the mirror, the image will not go away.
It is true that we rarely see anything positive about Bangladesh in the western
media, for which the old adage, man bites dog is news, is still valid. Today’s
media loves to report the bad news; and bad news usually drives away good news.
Barbara Crossette, the New York Times’ former South Asia Bureau Chief, once told
me, we report what we see. We don’t invent news.

The Governments in Bangladesh have always reacted with predictable single
mindedness in dismissing Bangladesh’s image problem as a foreign conspiracy. In
recent months, the only damage control the government has come up with is
restricting the movement of foreign reporters. Last year a New York Times
correspondent was denied visa. Even Monica Ali, praised for her first novel
Brick Lane, did not get a visa when she applied as a writer. Another reporter
from the New York Times, while covering micro credit projects, had two detective
branch agents following her all the way from Dhaka to Chittagong.

None of these helps Bangladesh. It is not a crime to be poor. But it is
criminal not to fight poverty. It is not a sin to live in a corrupt country.
But it is sacrilegious not to resist corruption. There is nothing overtly
shameful about the growth of extremism in one’s country. What is despicable is
when one hides the truth and refuses to fight the extremists.

This is where Bangladesh Government and its people can act more maturely and
show greater transparency. It needs to acknowledge its own failures and start
working on them.

#5 : Shouldn’t the national media be more responsible? Isn’t it unpatriotic
for non-resident Bangladeshis – or Bangladeshi political leaders traveling
abroad – to criticize the government of Bangladesh?

The question of criticism by non-resident Bangladeshis – and by some opposition
leaders – has made headlines in recent months because the government has sounded
its displeasure of views they have openly aired. It has been particularly
unhappy with the activities of those Bangladeshi groups which have strongly
criticized the government for its complicity with rising communal violence and
religious extremism. Obviously, the government would prefer unadulterated
appreciation and praise. It has also been unhappy with those newspapers and
other media outlets which have been critical for failing to stop communal
violence. It would probably prefer the media not to be a watchdog but a lapdog.
The national media’s role is very clear. If it is to play a credible role as
the so-called fourth state, and more importantly, as one of the checks and
balances against official excesses, it has to report faithfully and objectively
the developments on the ground. Its job is not to take a partisan position:
either for or against. The editors and columnists can and should do that.
That’s how a national dialogue on major national issues is created. To borrow a
line from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former Senator from New York, the media
can play with opinions but not with facts.

In recent months, in the context of the war on terror, we have heard in the US
the call for “responsible journalism” from many conservative pundits. We are at
war and hence everyone should follow the commander-in-chief, they say. If we
agree with this fallacious dictum, we accept an automatic censorship, either
self-inflicted or ideology-driven. In the weeks before the Iraq invasion, the
majority of the US media echoed the views of the US Government and defended the
policy of pre-emptive strike. Judith Miller of the New York Times went out of
her way to look for evidence to defend the Government claim about Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction. I remember sitting with her in a public forum where
she said, now it was more important to be a patriot than a professional.

Patriotism, sir, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so said Samuel Johnson. Now
we know, from Judith Miller’s bunglings, that Dr. Johnson was right. A
journalist must never confuse his or her professional responsibility with
patriotism. In most cases, patriotism ends up meaning defence of government
policies, usually articulated through the prism of the reigning ideology. Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein may have been unpatriotic – that is “un-Republican”
– for exposing Nixon’s shenanigans in the Watergate scandals, but they proved
to be sound professionals. Seymour Hirsch may have hurt the US’s foreign policy
goals in Iraq by exposing the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, but he only did what a
good reporter is supposed to do. Tipu Sultan’s exposé of Jainal Hazari’s reign
of terror in Feni may have cost Awami League an election, but Bangladesh is now
safer with one less hooligan. Some Dhaka newspapers may have reported
extensively on the post-2001 communal violence and thus earned the government’s
wrath, but their efforts helped save many lives.

I believe that, the media can show the highest form of citizenship by monitoring
events in the society and making the public aware of them and of their import.
As Bill Kovach of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
said, the media must skeptically examine the behaviour of people and
institutions of power so that informed debate on public policies and a dialogue
on future courses of action can ensue. The media, so much like the public
intellectual in the tradition of Edward Said , must do this by maintaining a
safe distance from the seats of power and, whenever possible, by attacking them.

The expatriates can and should play a similar role. When they criticize a
government, they help it become better. When they raise their voice, the
government realizes that others are watching. After all, when the voices at
home are stifled, the only voice left to be raised is the one of the expatriate.
One’s country and the government are not synonymous. Nor should one confuse
criticizing a government with denouncing one’s own country. In fact, when we
oppose a Government, even when we do so on the basis of our preferred ideology,
we show that we care.

#6: What can non-resident Bangladeshis do to help Bangladesh improve its image?

My immediate answer: not much. Unless the reality changes on the ground, the
image will not. What however they can do is introduce a new language in the
overall conversation about Bangladesh that will help illuminate some less
focused elements. I have already mentioned some: Bangladesh’s struggle for
democracy and political pluralism, its resistance to religious extremism,
innovative approaches to fighting poverty, and most importantly, its rich and
varied culture.

The single most important thing that NRBs can do is raise their voices. When
expatriate Bangladeshis speak, their voices are heard much louder back home.
The media takes notice; the Government pays attention, the civil society gets
energized. When we extend support to a cause, for example, in areas of human
rights, the people feel emboldened, and in the process we help create a global
ring of solidarity. NRBs must act. This is done best when they find
like-minded people, create networks and take very narrowly defined specific
actions. NRBs have three things that few political groups back home can claim to
possess:

(a) financial clout;
(b) access to western media and policy makers in foreign capitals; and
(c) safety from persecution.

NRBs can also raise their visibility in their adopted community. They are the
mirror through which much of Bangladesh is reflected. They can help make that
reflection better, stronger, more colorful.

What about the role of Bangladeshis in Bangladesh? I can think of many things,
but none more important than electing good and honest people to public offices
at all levels.

That key to better governance is within our grasp, but are we ready to use it?

16 December 2004, New York