EYE ON ETHICS

Mr. Gunawardene is a writer and journalist who blogs on media, society and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com. He can be reached on alien@nalaka.org.
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The spectacular Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was watched live on television by over a billion people worldwide. One of its most memorable moments was when a little girl in a red dress sang “Ode to the Motherland” as China’s flag was paraded into Beijing’s National Stadium.

This single high profile performance turned Lin Miaoke, 9, into an instant celebrity in China. But within 48 hours, it was revealed that she was merely lip-synching to the voice of another girl.

Under pressure, Beijing games organizers admitted that the voice was actually of another girl, Yang Peiyi, 7. She was heard but never seen — simply because a high ranking Communist Party official had deemed her not “cute enough”.

So in the last few days before the event, the performers were switched. With elaborate stagecrafting and clever sound mixing, the perfect performance was achieved. We might never have known if the general music designer for the opening ceremony, Chen Qigang, didn’t disclose it in a radio interview.

Lip-synching itself is not an issue – many leading performers have resorted to it on occasion, usually playing back pre-recorded renderings of their own. For example, opera star Luciano Pavarotti did it during the 2006 Torino winter Olympics opening ceremony, owing to ill health and cold weather.

But the substitution of voices, as happened in Beijing, is rare and, until the revelation, it tricked a global audience.

Intense scrutiny by the media also found that one early sequence of the fireworks shown to television viewers actually included digitally enhanced computer graphics used for “theatrical effect.”

For sure, the Chinese authorities had planned long and hard to present their best face to the world during the Olympics. This was the challenge given to the accomplished film-maker Zhang Yimou, who oversaw the production of one of the most spectacular opening ceremonies in Olympic history.

Impressive no doubt it was, but some strategies adopted – such as lip-synching and image manipulation – fueled debate on how much the end justifies the means. The Chinese blogosphere initially exploded in discussions on this topic, but many outspoken comments were soon deleted or blocked.

We have come a long way since the Olympics were first commercially broadcast from Rome in 1960. Today, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) earns more than half of its entire income by selling broadcast rights to the summer and winter games.

We are talking big money here. From 1984 to 2008, according to the IOC website, they have concluded broadcast agreements worth more than US$ 10 billion – of which Beijing alone accounted for over US$ 1.7 billion.

While this generates very useful funds for sports development, it also raises the stakes to dizzy heights. This, in turn, pressures IOC and the host cities to invest so much time, effort, creativity and money in staging ever more spectacular opening (and to a lesser extent, closing) ceremonies. High paying broadcasters expect nothing less.

The Olympics celebrates the best and the brightest of the Global Family, and there is nothing wrong in having a gala party to open and close the games. But should that extend to rolling out all the tricks of showbiz and make believe? With such a massive global audience following the games on television and online, where do the IOC and hosts draw the line?

I recently wrote a commentary in my Moving Images blog, arguing that the lip synching incident was symptomatic of a deeper malady where the broadcast television “tail” is wagging the Olympic “dog”.

I said: “This is not the first time that the world’s greatest sporting festival has been carefully stage-crafted for the benefit of broadcast television, nor would it be the last.”

My remarks inspired some interesting comments. One visitor, calling himself Grant, said: “I’m tired of watching countries bankrupt themselves to make bigger and more spectacular Olympics (and ceremonies), reading the stories of IOC bribes and corruption and seeing corporate sponsorship destroy freedom of expression for those attending events.”

Another named Bluesky83 disagreed: “People who bought the ticket and paid thousand of dollars expect to see a flawless and great performance. And China did it! This is a big event and there is absolutely zero tolerance for error! They spend $ 40 billion, you better be damn sure to make it work and flawless.”

David Damario from Canada was more reflective. “I think it is our own fault for the distortions of reality we see on TV and movies,” he said. “We do not want the true reality: it must be better, and pleasing to the eye. It is sad that substance will lose to style, but it is the reality of the media and our times—it is what we want and we get it.”

Ayesha, one of my regular Indian visitors, posed some sobering questions: “If we now allow trickery and fakery in the Olympics ceremonies, what will creep in next? We make such a fuss over athletes using performance enhancing drugs, but isn’t the Miaoke-Peiyi incident also a kind of performance enhancing?”

There are no easy answers, but it is extremely important that these questions are widely debated.

Filming in the global south not just a camera operation. TVE Asia Pacific

Indeed, broadcast television distorts reality on a daily basis. This industry prefers and promotes those whom it considers more cute, pretty, good-looking, and sexy. In choosing style over substance, producers and their managers often stretch or breach ethical norms. And this happens not just in entertainment but in all areas of coverage—including news and current affairs.

Alarmingly, these biases spill over into television coverage of issues like poverty, war, and disasters. In such matters, where balanced, factual reportage is required and presumed, many television producers would opt for faces that they think are telegenic, cute or at least look particularly wretched.

The globalized media continue to use stereotyped images of the global South – captured mostly by northern photographers and camera crews. As Shahidul Alam, head Drik Picture Library in Bangladesh, says: “Invariably, films about the plight of people in developing countries show how desperate and helpless they are…. Wide angle black and white shots, grainy, high contrast images characterize the typical third world helpless victim.”

Sometime ago, I caricaturised this in a single sentence: “Hands up who is poor, speaks English and looks good on TV!” Crude and insensitive as it sounds, it is close to how some camera crews go on location looking for that convenient sound-bite with some doom-and-gloom visuals to match.

It is not just the northern media who sensationalize and oversimplify life in the global South. Many of our own southern media outlets, rooted mostly in the cities and obsessed with middle class life styles, are equally guilty.

Part of the blame lies with passive television audiences, who uncritically accept whatever manufactured reality their broadcasters dish out. We bloggers and media activists have not yet succeeded in engaging enough couch potatoes in our critical analysis of TV average.

The mainstream media’s conditioning can be strong and persistent. Last year, I made a short film on telephone use habits in five emerging economies in South and Southeast Asia. It drew on a survey carried out mostly among those in the lower socio-economic groups, or at the bottom of the income pyramid. It showed how tens of millions of Asians from low income backgrounds are getting connected to each other—and to the information society—by regularly using and/or owning telephones.

When the film premiered at a major ICT conference in Kuala Lumpur in December, one audience comment was that the phone-using poor we featured did not look poor enough!

We encountered similar feedback when my organization, TVE Asia Pacific, tracked the recovery stories of 2004 tsunami survivors in the main affected countries. We chose statistically average families, and stayed with them for a year documenting whatever twists and turns their lives took. Filming with the families’ informed consent, we did not dramatize anything. One year on, several families had made little or no recovery, despite the donation frenzy the tsunami inspired.

Some of our viewers were stunned by this complete lack of drama. Audiences today seem to prefer constant action, no matter that the ground reality is: ours were disappointed when this was not forthcoming.

This explains why reality TV – where everything is highly orchestrated – has high audience ratings in many countries in Asia. There is real danger when the divide between factual and entertainment content blurs.

For sure, there is enough drama in real life in today’s world, but it’s not necessarily the kind of neatly packaged action that broadcast TV demands. This builds pressure on TV news reporters and current affairs producers—and even documentary film-makers—to come up with action-packed content featuring good-looking, well-spoken people. In that process, creative liberties are often taken and ethical constraints relaxed.

What happened at the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony is part of this worrying trend that pervades much of broadcast television. It can only be stemmed by audiences becoming more aware and active in demanding a clear demarcation between entertainment and factual reportage.