Author: Piotr Bratkowski. Source: Newsweek Polska, No. 39. Date of publication: 2003.

Complaining about a falsified image of the world in the media is hypocrisy. We ourselves choose the information that is most convenient for us — argues Ryszard Kapuściński.

I go to meet Ryszard Kapuściński fresh from reading his A Portrait of the Reporter — a book he essentially did not write. It was prepared by Znak Publishers on the basis of interviews he gave, excerpts from his lectures and media appearances. These were assembled so as to give a clear picture of the great reporter’s journalistic philosophy and his diagnosis of the transformations the world has undergone over the last half century. The volume will appear in bookshops in a few days.

Had I not read A Portrait of the Reporter, I would probably have been surprised entering his study. The naive stereotype of the global reporter collapses immediately. There are no objects here intended to prove that the host has, in the course of his journalistic wanderings, traversed almost the whole world, that he has observed several dozen wars, revolutions, and coups d’état. This is not a war correspondent’s room from Hollywood films; it is an intellectual’s study, lined from floor to ceiling with rows of books.

As always when I am at someone’s home for the first time, I glance instinctively at the shelves. And I spot with fond recognition the same editions I have in my own library: Gabinet luster — the old anthology of American prose with whose publication discussion of postmodernism began in Poland; the novels of James Baldwin, a “cult” writer of Black America thirty years ago; a volume of poetry by Tadeusz Różewicz; and Olga Tokarczuk’s Prawiek i inne czasy.

Today, however, Kapuściński is studying a different kind of literature. He reads the ancient Greeks and contemporary scholars of antiquity. — You have no idea how that has changed — he says. — In my youth there was a certain fixed canon of knowledge about antiquity. Today every book presents a different vision of the ancient world. And since each of those books is good, it is impossible to arrive at any coherent image — says the author of The Emperor.

A sign of the postmodern age? Kapuściński is “steeped” in antiquity because he has just begun work on Travels with Herodotus. Successive chapters he writes week by week, as demanded by the rhythm of publication in successive Saturday editions of Gazeta Wyborcza. The beginning of the book describes Kapuściński’s first foreign reporting journey — that was almost half a century ago, so I ask how journalistic travel has changed in the intervening years. Can a reporter, revisiting a place after years, fall back on methods once tried and tested in unfamiliar reality?

Ryszard Kapuściński shakes his head. — In the world I used to travel to, rural culture predominated: closed and hierarchical. If I was accepted by the local tribal chief, all doors were open to me — he relates. Today urban civilisation dominates. The world has accelerated in every respect. In antiquity a new generation was considered to appear every 40 years; today, by UN norms, every 13. And in reality it happens even faster. — Fifteen-year-olds consider twenty-year-olds to be old men who don’t understand their world — Kapuściński laughs.

What does that mean for the reporter? — That a person who comes from outside no longer has any universal keys that would allow him to get inside mentally. Each time he must try new ways, and even that with the awareness that he will know only a fragment, never a synthesis — argues the author of Imperium.

All of this has come about through the violent acceleration of technology.

— We are not aware of what has happened before our eyes. For example, the spread of the obvious-today invention of electricity has meant that daily human activity has almost doubled in length, after millennia of being determined by the natural rhythm of day and night — explains Kapuściński.

The mass tourism of recent decades has by no means made us more curious about the world than before. On the contrary. Millions of Europeans travelling the world make no effort to get to know it. In isolated tourist resorts they connect their own television channels, build restaurants serving their national cuisine. — Travel is one of the contemporary forms of consumption — explains Kapuściński. — And consumption requires no knowledge of the world; on the contrary: awareness of the conflicts consuming it could disturb the peaceful pleasure of consuming — he adds. That is why in the media images that reach us these conflict zones are isolated from the rest of the world. Like disease outbreaks — Kapuściński explains. — But by this isolation we deprive them of context, make their understanding impossible. The bloody version of events in Rwanda circulated by the media had nothing whatsoever to do with what actually happened there — the writer relates. — Except that media versions of events are today considered more credible than real ones.

Small wonder for ordinary tourists, but a similar lack of curiosity afflicts the profession of foreign correspondent. — They arrive in a conflict zone only to authenticate their reports with bulletproof jackets — Kapuściński remarks ironically. — They don’t move from the Hilton, where they sip Scotch, watch television, and attend press conferences. They see only what one side of the conflict is willing to show them. Then they leave convinced they have become great experts on, say, Sri Lanka. They are ordinary dilettantes. — Yet precisely such dilettantes are what the media needs. — Because the media is not run by journalists wishing to understand and explain the world, but by businessmen with no interest in the world, wanting only to sell their product — comments Kapuściński. And a stereotype sells better than the truth, because people have no wish to change their image of the world. — That is why dilettantes delivering three smooth, context-free sentences on every topic are more readily listened to than people actually trying to explain what is happening around us — explains the author of Another Day of Life.

Do contemporary media then find their own tail — instead of explaining the world, creating their own version of it, easier for the audience to digest? Not exactly. — If I wanted to read serious newspapers regularly and watch ambitious television stations, I would have no time for anything else — says Kapuściński. — The media give us as much as we want to take from them — he adds. And if we complain that they show us a falsified image of the world, we ourselves are to blame: — We prefer to see images that are convenient for us, that don’t change our habits.

Kapuściński calls precisely this lack of curiosity of ours — not the youthful demonstrations at global political and economic summits — the true contemporary anti-globalism.

And concludes: — For the inhabitants of the richer part of the planet, only their own world is authentic. Everything else is merely an element of the décor.

Piotr Bratkowski

source: kapuscinski.info