Indebted to celebrity

Meejit looks at the media's treatment of the Live 8 spectacle.

It was inevitable that African debt would turn out to be a celebrity story – with all the intellectual rigour that category entails, and less.

While one might fairly expect The Star to accompany its G-8 coverage with a big colour photo of that well-known mover 'n' shaker Claudia Schiffer, the State's "public service broadcaster" (and that really needs inverted commas these days) spent the weekend leading its news items on the US/UK debt-cancellation proposal with the reactions of a couple of rock stars. Neither one, to Meejit's knowledge and despite the evocative names, is actually an African.

The Irish Times, under the byline of a deeply – or, rather, shallowly – credulous Frank Millar, also foregrounded Sir Bob, while the Sunday Independent quoted a delighted Bono: "This is something I will tell my kids, this is history in the making." Should social services be warned about this man who abuses his children with stories of how Daddy saved the world?

On RTÉ, however, Bono was quoted sounding a cautionary note: the world was not quite saved yet. Bush and Blair had written the cheque, Bono said, but the campaign's cannon fodder should still go to Scotland to ensure the cheque gets sent. A popular rallying cry for the history books, to be sure.

There is a malodorous whiff of noblesse oblige about all this, with singers and supermodels behaving precisely like the oft-clichéd "new aristocracy". (Lest Meejit be accused of total negativity, we happily concede that aristocrats who are good-looking and have some talent represent genuine historic progress.) Their nostrums are about as likely to "make poverty history" in this century as Irish landlords' road-building schemes were likely to stave off famine in the 1840s.

But the landlords of old, even the "good" ones, got some critical press. The tepid debt-relief campaigners of today's aristocracy, who are arguably harming the cause of the world's poor by raising false hope in the efficacy of less-than-half-measures, tend to be criticised only by right-wingers who think "forgiving debt" sounds wimpy and that Africa needs tough love.

Sadly, sadistic tough love remains exactly what's on the agenda. In The Irish Times, where only a Martyn Turner cartoon introduced sharp criticism of the plan's shortcomings (and then only of Blair and Bush, not of the other, Blessed B's), Millar reported with apparent approval the US determination to use the new dispensation to push "issues of governance, transparency and reforms to root out corruption" in Africa.

Anyone who believes that another way to give Washington, the IMF and the World Bank the whip-hand over the course of African development is in the interest of the continent's poor might want to look again over the last two decades.

Millar, in his partial defence, was doing a reporting job, not an analytical one. The journalists who might be expected to deal with the economic niceties and development implications, the people who can handle such figures critically – business correspondents perhaps – seem often to be the least inclined to do so.

Fortunately, there are journalists who have been prepared to sink their teeth into this story, and the magic of the Internet brings them to our desktops. Torcuil Crichton, for example, writing in Scotland's Sunday Herald, acknowledges the enormous amount of "aid" that comes from the US to Africa, but captures the neo-colonial context: "According to the World Bank's 2003 global development finance report, the huge continent offers 'the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world'."

George Monbiot in the Guardian points out that throughout history virtually no country has ever got rich by following the West's new prescription, ie open your floodgates to foreign investment and watch all the boats rise. Journalists like Monbiot illustrate, Irish pride aside, how little the world needs Bono and Bob.