How the Media Ruined the G-8

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images Stop digging: To be truly effective, the G-8 will need to move away from meaningless, feel-good stagecraft and return to its elitist roots.

Every year its the same story: Expectations are low for the Group of Eight summit. Analysts dont anticipate any major breakthroughs as the leaders of the worlds richest countries meet in [insert city here] this week. In fact, one could write the obituary for this years meeting in Japan already:

Once again, the worlds most powerful leaders gathered together and failed to solve the worlds most pressing problems: stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS, eliminating poverty, fighting terrorism, bridging the digital divide, promoting universal primary education, alleviating poor-country debt, halting climate change, developing Africa, combating nuclear proliferation, reaching agreement on missile defense, lowering food prices and trade barriers, controlling pandemics, safeguarding intellectual property, and promoting good governance, sustainable investment, transparency in financial markets, energy efficiency, and peace and security, to name just a few of the G-8s recent priorities.

Are we beginning to see the problem here?

To be sure, these are all important issues, and they deserve high-level attention. Heads of state, meeting face to face, can cut through reams of red tape and come to quick agreement when the occasion demands. Moreover, big decisions such as cutting emissions are inherently political, and must be made by political leaders rather than lower-level bureaucrats. But high-level attention is a precious commodity, and it ought to be treated as such. Better to prioritize a few, tangible missions than to constantly come up short on them all.

In fact, the G-8 was never intended to become the worlds comprehensive problem solver. The original group had a relatively narrow mission: to respond to the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the Nixon Shock of 1971, when the United States suddenly announced that its dollars were no longer convertible to gold. Facing an economic crisis, George Shultz, treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, gathered his foreign counterparts in the White House library in 1973 to hash out a common strategy to combat stagflation. Two years later, France invited heads of state to the first summit of major powers at the Chteau de Rambouillet, a former hunting lodge outside of Paris. Italy, Canada, and eventually Russia joined the ranks of the original five-member Library Group. From the beginning, the G-8 strove for informality: To this day, the organization has no charter, no headquarters, and no permanent staff.

Still, Rambouillet was a success. Leaders agreed on 14 concrete commitments, mainly involving trade, monetary policy, and energy. The first few summits generated 14 or fewer such agreements each, hashed out behind closed doors and announced in a final communiqu. Their decisions fostered freer trade policies, helped to steer the world out of the economic doldrums, and built consensus on energy reforms. But it wasnt long before commitment creep set in, and the gathering lost focus entirely. By 2006, when the group met in St. Petersburg, G-8 leaders were making an astounding 317 commitments on everything from fighting tuberculosis to addressing gender disparities in education, only to break that record by adding 329 new ones in Heiligendamm, Germany, a year later. Meanwhile, serious global economic imbalances and a burgeoning energy crisis went largely unaddressed.

What went wrong? Richard Burt, a former assistant U.S. secretary of state for European affairs and a onetime ambassador to Germany, blames the media. As soon as thousands of reporters began showing up at summits, Burt told a recent panel at the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, what were seen as informal, consultative talks got transformed into political contests. Leaders became more concerned about preening for the cameras and trying to please everyone. Once a clubby, informal gathering of heads of state, the typical G-8 summit became a media-driven discussion of apple pie and motherhood issues, Burt argues, where celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof can make an appearance and plead for issues that resonate with the press.

Burt has a point. In the early days of what was once the G-6Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Statesmedia coverage was relatively subdued. A mere 400 journalists were on hand to cover Rambouillet in 1975. The atmosphere was cooperative, consultative. But by the 1980s, press attendance had soared, reaching as high as 5,000 for the 1998 Toronto summit and, by some reports, as many as 10,000 for the 2000 summit in Okinawa. This year, some 4,000 journalists are in Hokkaido, all of them looking for headlines. For politicians, the resulting temptation to support feel-good exercises at the expense of substantive progress has too often proven irresistible. This years non-binding goal of halving emissions by 2050 is a case in point. Five decades on, the political leaders who made this toothless commitment will be long gone, but for now the press will dutifully report that at least world leaders averted an embarrassing failure to reach consensus.

Leaders have occasionally sensed that things were getting out of hand. After a particularly unproductive summit at Versailles in 1982, when the French and American spokesmen sniped at one another at competing press conferences, U.S. President Ronald Reagan insisted that the following years summit revert to the informal ways of the 1970s. Williamsburg [in 1983] was the first exercise in downsizing, and offered for the first time a heads-only meeting, Henry Nau, a National Security Council staffer for international economic affairs at the time, told the University of Torontos G8 Research Group. It actually went really well. Since then, G-8 hosts have sporadically tried to keep the media at bay, with varying success. But with an economic crisis brewing that looks an awful lot like 70s stagflation, we must try harder. Its time to bring the G-8 back to its elitist roots.