The Frontman by Harry Browne

Author:Harry Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

EDITORIAL CONTROL: PRINTING THE MYTH

‘I have no embarrassment at all. No shame.’ Bono said so himself, disarmingly, in the 16 May 2006 edition of the London Independent, which he was credited with editing. He said it apropos of nothing much, in the course of an interview with comedian Eddie Izzard.127 Nonetheless, it sums up as well as anything else could his capacity to take an opportunity like this and sink it in the mire of ‘brand awareness’ for (RED), rather than using it as a vehicle for developing a higher and deeper consciousness of global development issues.

The Independent should have been the perfect vehicle for the latter approach. Then still a part of Irish mogul Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News and Media group, the most powerful chain of newspapers in Ireland, the English ‘Indie’ had a modest circulation among mostly left-liberal readers; and though its editor Simon Kellner had dragged it slightly downmarket, it still had a name for sharp and sophisticated reporting and analysis, not least through its two great writers on the Middle East, Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn. Its tabloid shape was used as a means of presenting strong pictures and graphics rather than as an excuse for dumbing-down. Its front page was generally used as a sort of poster for a story or stories inside, and didn’t contain much text.

Bono-as-editor’s front page was a strong one, though why he needed the fashionable artist Damien Hirst to come in and design this simple twist on the idea of a newspaper is unknown: it was soaked in red – or should that be (RED)? – and cried out in large letters, ‘NO NEWS TODAY’, with an asterisk to guide the eye to the small print at the bottom of the page: ‘Just 6,500 Africans died today as a result of a preventable, treatable disease. (HIV/AIDS).’

No mistake, this was a powerful message. In a world of death tolls, where fewer than half that number of fatalities in New York and Washington on 9/11 became the dominant fact of global affairs for several years thereafter, it is worth noting not only that thousands more people die each day, every day, of AIDS, but that in the eyes of the Western media this apparently does not constitute a story. Yet at the same time it must be admitted that it is the sort of impersonal statistic that makes readers glaze over; and in keeping with the (RED) message it both limits and overgeneralises the AIDS story to be about ‘Africans’, when in half the continent’s countries it is not a huge problem, and when those dying are first and foremost individual people, not the inhabitants of a particular landmass.

Still, if Bono had stopped right there it would have been a good day’s work. Indeed, given that millions more people glimpsed this front page than actually bought and read the paper, it might be said that, having produced a strong consciousness-raising cover, he achieved much of what he set out to achieve.

But there was another phrase on that front page: ‘Genesis 1:27’.

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