On Tuesday 27 November, a group of experts gathered at the Frontline Club to discuss the issues and nuances that surround the task of: Covering poverty in an indifferent world. This subject was recently explored by the BBC’s Why Poverty? series in an episode covering the campaigning efforts of Bob Geldof and Bono, and the resulting phenomena were also addressed by the panel.

Covering poverty in an indifferent world panel discussion

The Live Aid and Make Poverty History movements have been criticised for failing to fully achieve their ambitious aims. But today – as writer and activist Paul Vallely explained – millions of lives have been saved due to the public’s response and lobbying efforts in fora such as the Gleneagles G8 Summit in 2005.

“Most aid works, yet that’s not the perception as it comes across in the media.”

Paul Vallely also criticised an attitude of ‘cognative dissidance’ from issues of poverty as seen in the media today. This reflects, he said, an attitude of wilful ingnorance and cynicism currently adopted by many:

“They feel they want to defend the status quo which includes them not having to take any kind of responsibility for the fact that they are in a exploitative relationship with a lot of the other people in the world.”

On, the other hand, Andrew Hogg, head of media at Christian Aid, argued that in fact it is a matter of messaging:

“In terms of getting people to address that poverty, when it is presented in terms that they can understand, at the moment the door seems to be further open than it is closed.”

So what terms are currently being used to the most effect when communicating these issues? Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor of Media and Communications at LSE, proposed that currently a ‘post- humanitarian’ form of solidarity prevails. This approach, she said, moves the focus away from those who are suffering and onto the self:

“It’s about ‘us’, it’s about how we feel good, and by feeling good we are also contributing to other people’s well being… no distant sufferers are being portrayed in these campaigns, the others are completely left outside.”

It is within this paradigm that we find a significant use of celebrity she argued.

In defense of a celebrity focussed strategy, Jamie Drummond, co-founder and executive director of ONE explained:

“Every time somebody says ‘I hate it when celebrities are used to promote a cause, my answer is ‘well let’s try and get that cause, that mission, to get the same amount of coverage without a celebrity – what would it take? … Until we can do that, sometimes, we’ve got to live in the world we live in, we’ve got to use them, but we’d all like not to.”

As a closing thought, Lilie Chouliaraki added:

“Perhaps we can reverse the terms and then say ‘well why don’t we use that celebrity, that popular culture to celebritize people who are not celebrities yet, but who are doing incredible work… and make them the heros that they diserve to be.'”

Watch the full event here:

Once more, the power of money and its threat to democracy became the focus at Frontline, where the documentary The Brussels Business was shown on Friday evening and followed by a Q&A with directors Friedrich Moser and Mattieu Lietaert.

The Brussels Business analyzes the European Union’s growing lobby industry in Belgium’s capital, now the world’s second largest lobbying presence behind Washington, D.C.  The movie traces how corporations, rather than politicians, have ultimately pulled the strings in creating and directing the EU’s Monetary Union.  

Co-director Friedrich Moser told the audience:

"We were digging for what was actually the biggest lobby success of the European Union, and it’s the European Union itself."

Olivier Hoedeman, a corporate watchdog based in Brussels, argues in the film that:

"Twenty years of deregulation and liberalization […] a single market, a monetary union… [and downsizing] public services" were all part of a neoliberal agenda that business leaders used the EU to achieve."

In the mid-1990s, Hoedeman began working to expose corporate power in EU lobbying after noticing: 

"So many examples of new policies that were basically captured by industry, by industry lobbying."

During the Q&A, Moser and co-director Matthieu Lietaert emphasized two keys to a democratic EU that isn’t coopted by corporations:  transparency, and fair balance.  Lietaert noted:

"In Brussels, you have six-hundred lobby groups working for corporate interests. [But] you have less than twenty groups in the interest of society and NGOs." 

As Hoedeman asserts in the film:

"The question is: how many of the MEPs are defending the interests of the people, and how many are defending the interests of big business?"

The Brussels Business highlights the failure of European Commissioner Sim Kallas’ initiative to require lobbies to join a transparent register, and it recounts the near-passage of a 1998 law that severely weakened governments’ capacity to pass legislation that constrained corporations.  

The law was blocked only when its contents were leaked and made public, an NGO-fuelled firestorm of protest ensued before the vote, and France finally vetoed it.

The directors ended the evening by sharing their next project: an online game that lets users "play the lobbyist," thus engaging citizens with the weekly votes and debates in the European Parliament. Lietaert explained:

"You go online, and you start voting […]  Suddenly we tell Brussels, ‘hey, we’re watching you, and here is our voice.’  And then you can enter a dialogue […]  This is, for us, one of the big problems with democracy in Brussels […] there is no dialogue any more.  With the internet, we create that.  It would be 5, maybe ten minutes per week […] We are looking for funding for that."

Brussels is the second biggest lobbying capital of the world. With the existence of a strong, well organised and deeply rooted lobby network directors Friedrich Moser and Matthieu Lietaert raise the question who really runs the European Union.

The Brussels Business goes back to the first time representatives of multi national companies met on a European level to purposefully influence politics. meetings would take place every six months, right before each EU summit. Nowadays Brussels is the home of 15.000 lobbyists, PR-conglomerates, and think tanks with with their own agenda’s to hand over to the political elite.

In The Brussels Business, Moser and Lietaert show a different version of the European integration, exploring the close ties of political leaders and the private sector in the process leading to the common market.

Directors: Friedrich Moser and Matthieu Lietaert
Year: 2012
Running Time: 85′