Written by: Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed
Posted on: February 09, 2022 | 
| 中文
Dr. Savio in his study in Rome
Chairman Mao’s famous quote that ‘an idea becomes a material force only when it’s grasped by millions of people’, aptly applies to the Inter Press Service (IPS), founded by Dr Roberto Savio over a half a century ago. The idea of an alternative news service has been transformed into a ‘material force’, giving a new meaning to the concept of news and information.
We are sitting in the heart of Rome, Via Panisperna, where Dr. Roberto Savio has had his office for the last 58 years. His energy and activity, both mental and physical, belies his age. At 87, he walks the 7 kilometres from his house to his office and climbs the two flights of stairs to reach his office. When I caution him about the traffic on the roads of Rome as he walks home every evening, he responds: ‘Look here, Rome is over 2000 years old, and these roads were meant for pedestrians, not cars’. I have known Dr. Savio, arguably one of Europe and Third World’s pre-eminent public intellectuals (he has Italian and Argentinean nationality), for the last 35 years. He is probably the only living journalist who was witness to three major summits of the 20th Century: Bandung Afro-Asian Summit 1955, meeting of Tito, Nasser and Nehru at Brioni, Yugoslavia in 1960, which laid the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the 1978 first-ever North-South Summit at Cancun.
Dr. Savio with the revolutionary, Che Guevara, on whom Dr Savio did a documentary
Dr. Savio also co-founded the Non-Aligned Press Pool, along with the founder, the Director of the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. This was besides the first-ever Third World news agency, Inter Press Service (IPS), now aptly called ‘OtherNews’. Dr. Savio is somewhat unique as an eyewitness to history and builder of institutions, since he’s not just a man of ideas but also a man of action, who has the will to translate his vision into reality. In 1964, four Western news agencies: Associated Press (AP), and United Press International (UPI), both American, Agence France Presse (AFP) and the British Reuters, jointly controlled 96% of the world’s free of information. It was a near total monopoly of how and what information was disseminated. It was in this context that Dr. Savio, along with an Argentinean journalist, founded the Inter Press Service (IPS), the first Third World News agency with its headquarters in Rome. And IPS, guided by its guru, had the audacity to challenge this monopoly of news and information, which is a subject of a number of studies. Noam Chomsky calls it ‘Manufacturing Consent’ and ‘Media Control: spectacular achievements of propaganda’. Edward Said, in his landmark study, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World.
It was thus no accident that major wars were started on the ‘Big Lie’, peddled by a pliant media by first ‘Manufacturing Consent’, so that wars would have political backing. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which laid the groundwork for the Vietnam War, or the 2003 baseless fabrication about Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a precursor to war, are both cases in point.
Dr. Savio receiving an award for IPS reporting on population and human development issues
Dr. Savio was a hands-on boss at IPS, (I know it because I worked for him at IPS for close to a decade!), personally presiding over editorial meetings at such locations as Manila, Bangkok and Rome, giving ideas and directions but always willing to listen and learn. He led IPS with a crusader’s passion to present a perspective that was different, and, at times, opposed to what the ‘mainstream’ Western media outlets were promoting. Dr Savio’s lasting legacy remains the institution that he created, built and nurtured, namely, the award-winning IPS. He pushed forward its mission with a difference, “giving a voice to the voiceless”, creating a media bridge of understanding between the South and the North, the East and the West. And Dr Savio was never ‘neutral’ in the battle for right versus wrong, when it came to issues of oppression, exploitation, dictatorship or the rights of the ‘wretched of the earth’. He received the “Salvador Allende” award at the 31st Festival of Latin America in Trieste in 2016, and a special diploma from the President of Chile for his role in opposing the Chilean military junta. He also produced a 3-part documentary on the legendary Che Guevara. Under Dr Savio’s visionary leadership, IPS received awards from the Washington-based Population Institute for being the ‘most conscientious news service’ nine times; it received the FAO’s A.H. Boerma Award for Journalism for ‘focusing on issues such as rural living, migration, refugees and the plight of women and children’.
The book that Dr. Savio wrote about IPS and his remarkable team
Dr Savio’s idealism of the 1970s and 1980s has given way to pessimism and disappointment as the divisions, class and cultural, deepen amidst an increasingly polarised world.
He is deeply disappointed with two erstwhile democracies, the United States and India. “The America we knew no longer exists”, laments Dr. Savio. “That America has gone now”. In fact, he feels that political polarisation is so deep in the US, with 60 million Evangelicals (the Religious Right) in the US pushing the country rightwards, that he’s convinced Donald Trump will be back with a bang in 2024! Ever the empirical fact-checker that he is, Dr. Savio cites a PEW public opinion poll to corroborate his assertion. In the 1960s, he says, 8% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans didn’t want their children to get married to someone from the ‘other party’. Today, 88% of Democrats and 93% of Republicans have such beliefs, signifying an almost unbridgeable political divide. No wonder, in the 2020 US Presidential elections, Biden won with 80 million popular votes while Trump came a close second, with a record 75 million votes, most of whom are still convinced that the 2020 elections were ‘stolen’!
Dr. Savio busy at his outdoor study in Rome
The other country that has disappointed Dr. Savio is India, because “Nehru’s India has ceased to exist”. He adds “Nehru was a very careful statesman, he didn’t want confrontation within India, as he understood the diversity of people and opinion in India.” Dr. Savio then adds with a note of sorrow similar to his lament about the USA, “that Nehruvian India doesn’t exist any longer. Modi has divided India, Modi has marginalised Muslims”.
Looking at the global media, and the economic and political landscape, Dr. Savio opines that three factors are going to be decisive in transforming the world in the 21st Century. He sees the “print media as having a less and less of a role, as most of the print media is neither making money and newspapers like The New York Times are no longer posting many correspondents abroad. There was a time when Beirut had no less than 75 foreign correspondents.” He dismisses social media as “useless, dividing the world into bubbles, with 7 seconds as the average attention span of a teenager using the social media”. However, Dr. Savio understands how social media can be a ‘weapon of choice’ for some politicians, e.g. Donald Trump who has 86 million Twitter followers. Dr. Savio adds that in such a situation, ‘why should Trump bother about the American print media whose total daily circulation stands at 60 million, with quality print publications at less than 10 million’. Moreover, ‘media is now more local, no longer global’.
Dr. Savio in his study in Rome
The second important change, in Dr. Savio’s view is the crisis of capitalism, citing a quote of Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 that “capitalism cannot solve social problems”. He says “injustice is supreme, during the Coronavirus pandemic, some people still got a $1 billion bonus, with the 50 richest persons increasing their wealth by 27%, while over 500 million of the poorest got pushed below the poverty line”. He adds that most of the capitalist West is also facing other crises, with a wide variety of conspiracy theories getting support in the USA: the anti-vaccine campaign; 60 million Evangelicals in the USA convinced of the second coming of Christ; QAnon and the “Birds aren’t Real”.
Despite the rightwing racist campaign against immigrants, Western economies are increasingly dependent on foreign workers. Dr. Savio cites figures: “Germany needs 600,000 new migrant labour, while Canada needs 300,000” for skills and work that locals aren’t willing to do undertake anymore. The core issue is that “society has lost its moral compass, with the culture of greed paramount” in the capitalist West.
Given this context of a “greed is good” culture, Dr. Savio likens talk of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on the part of big companies as “locking the stables after the horses have bolted”. Actually, he concludes: “The capitalist system has collapsed.”
Dr. Savio was honoured for his resistance to the Chilean military junta
However, the third factor is Dr.Savio’s biggest worry: the future of Europe and the looming New Cold War. He is highly critical of NATO since, “it’s a structure of war, always searching for new enemies, and pushing Russia closer to China.” Criticising NATO for adding China to its list of “major challenges and threats”, Dr. Savio questions: “by which stretch of imagination is China part of the North Atlantic. This is an exercise in futility.” Moreover, he is convinced “Trump will come back in 2024, and one thing is for sure, Trump is not interested in spending American money on war”, perhaps the only silver lining in an otherwise gloomy scenario. With the exit of Merkel, Europe is leaderless, he adds.
Dr. Savio then quotes his late friend, the UN Secretary General Dr. Boutrus Boutrus Ghali, as telling him “the Americans are lousy allies and terrible enemies”, and the biggest problem is that “the Americans don’t want to be told yes, they want to be told, yes sir!.” Thankfully, in a world of multi-polarity requiring multilateralism, there are very few countries in today’s world that will simply acquiesce to US bidding with a nod of “Yes Sir”!
Dr Roberto Savio is actually part of a vanishing breed, the ‘Last of the Mohicans’, idealists who were builders in the quest for a better tomorrow, for whom the good fight is to present the truth, the unvarnished truth, while giving a voice to the voiceless, a task he has admirably performed. More power to his pen!
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