An unaccountable media

With people complaining about the lack of African acts involved and exaggerated viewership being touted about Live 8 is not welcome by all.

It's bad enough that most news media celebrate Bob Geldof's hijacking (castrating?) of the global justice movement. But we're also fed innumerate hype about the size of the global TV audience for Live 8.

At the time of writing, journalists are throwing around figures that claim a "potential audience" of 5.5 billion, and two billion actual viewers. These numbers aren't just coming from the local hypists, but reputable wire services such as Reuters and AP.

This is nothing new. Meejit recalls Louis Walsh casually boasting that one billion would watch Ronan Keating host the MTV Europe awards in Dublin. Walsh was exaggerating (that's the word, isn't it?), and doing so exponentially. That's his job, of course, but journalists didn't see theirs as correcting the story.

This is not simply a matter of anorak number-crunching. These claims paint a picture of a wider world excitedly sharing a set of cultural interests that emanate from the West.

But a scan of international media suggests that Africa is mainly pissed-off about the absence of its acts from the main Live 8 line-ups, while most of Asia and Latin America are indifferent to the affair. As for new technology, imagine Indians watching on broadband or Bolivians calling up U2's set on their mobile phones and you can see how irrelevant this is.

We don't even have to look to the "majority world" to see what rubbish they're talking. In this age of media multiplicity, in the Western countries where viewership is measured scientifically, the most significant national TV events (eg: a big match or the Late Late Toy Show) earn an audience of something less than one-third of the population – the sort of proportion of the whole world's people that the hypists tell us want to watch English-language rock concerts.

After 9/11, the four main US TV networks suspended their programming on a Friday evening to all show simultaneously the slick, star-studded Tribute to Heroes benefit. The official viewing figure for that show was 59 million, in a country of more than 300 million people.

If you expand the definition of "audience" to include anyone who caught some of the Heroes programme, the figure climbs to 89 million, similar to the Super Bowl, and twice the Oscars – events that also generate much nonsense about "global audience".

Live 8 is not scheduled for any of the major US networks – MTV got the rights – and its American audience can hardly be expected to approach these heights. Is it really likely that two billion will watch Live 8 globally, if only one to two per cent (at most) of that number is in the US, the major market for most of the headline acts?

It's appropriate that Live 8 and its hype come just after the six-month recollections of the Asian tsunami. That disaster and its aftermath underline how useless even the most generous charitable sensibility can be when it's not joined to a radical understanding of global and local power relations.

Admirably, one of the beneficiaries of the West's outpouring of cash, Oxfam, has admitted that in the relief effort "in some cases there has been a tendency to focus on landowners, business people, and the most high profile cases, rather than prioritise aid to poor communities" – a nice way of saying that reconstruction is a racket, and a profitable one.

This is an awkward line for the media that drove the fundraising. Kathy Sheridan in the Irish Times probed some of the problems before returning to familiar plugs for aid agencies. But on RTÉ radio John Aglionby of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, when asked about the ineffectiveness of some rebuilding, speculated that perhaps "this is sloth and people just expect the aid will drop in their laps".

We're never far from a blame-the-victim mentality, which is sure to surface again when the media mark the anniversaries of Live 8 and note how little has changed.