Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia

Benjamin Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415486330
• eBook ISBN: 9781134263936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

There are many different kinds of sub-national conflicts across Asia, with a variety of causes, but since September 11, 2001 these have been increasingly portrayed as part of the global terrorist threat, to be dealt with by the War on Terror.

This major new study examines a wide range of such conflicts, showing how, despite their significant differences, they share the role of the media as interlocutor, and exploring how the media exercises this role. The book raises a number of issues concerning how the media report different forms of political violence and conflict, including issues of impartiality in the media's relations with governments and insurgents, and how the focus on the 'War on Terror' has led to some forms of violence - notably those employed by states for political purposes - to be overlooked.

As the issue of international terrorism remains one of the most pressing issues of the modern day, this is a significant and important book which will interest the general reader and scholars from all disciplines.

1
US journalism

Servant of the nation, scourge of the truth?

Toby Miller

Introduction

The period since 11 September 2001 has seen both continuity and change in the way the US media and state have combined to produce realities for their audience and citizenry. This Chapter lays out how the mainstream US media, notably network and cable television, have worked as effective spokespeople for nationalism, in ways that coincide with the enunciation of national interest by the state. I will show it is no surprise that almost three quarters of the US public supported the invasion of Iraq (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2003a). It would have taken immense initiative, knowledge, and drive to think otherwise, especially given the shock of September 11 (Taylor 2003: B2) and the way that it heightened a sense of risk and hence self-protectiveness in the population of a world power capable of supreme destruction. The White House’s 2002 National Security Strategy was correct in identifying the nation’s gravest peril as located ‘at the crossroads of radicalism and technology’. But was that taken to signify the logocentric interdependence of US Zionism, militarism, transportation, construction, and high-octane fuel, which, together with Middle Eastern authoritarianism, economic inequality, and Islamic hyper-masculinity and religiosity produced the conditions of possibility for September 11?

No. It was taken as the cue for a reinvigorated propaganda effort via the euphemism ‘public diplomacy’. The desire to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the global south (signifying Islam) was invoked again and again. The new public diplomacy is supposed to transcend the material effects of policies and businesses and instead permit closer communication at a civil-society level, directly linking citizens across borders to ‘influence opinions and mobilize foreign publics’ (Council on Foreign Relations 2003:15; also see Gilboa 1998) by, as the State Department puts it, ‘engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences’ (Brown 2004). The idea is to achieve these goals in ways that work for the interests of the US government but avoid both that connotation and potential opposition from other states.

Republicans had nearly ended public diplomacy once they took control of the Congress in the mid-1990s, diminishing funding and staffing by 20–25 per cent, but quickly turned to it under George Bush minor as a way of affirming that ‘misunderstanding’ was responsible for the situation of the country internationally, creating the White House Office of Global Communications and a Policy Coordinating Committee on Strategic Communications. In 2002 they began Radio Free Afghanistan. That year also saw the advent of Culture Connect, which sent artists, writers, and musicians around the world to demonstrate US sophistication and decency and give young people a belief in their place in the world that was to do with something other than violence. Radio Sawa and Radio Farda began offering Arabic and Farsi language music and news. Later they developed TV links. And the venerable Voice of America extended its Indonesian and Cantonese programming (Center for Arts and Culture 2004:8; Council on Foreign Relations 2003:9, 27, 75; Schaefer 2004). I shall argue that, quite apart from the operation of US foreign policy, this goal is improbable given the manifest way that the US media operate as little more than a mouthpiece for official rhetoric in the discourse of terrorism and state action.

I investigate in this chapter various forces at play in the coverage of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 – notably journalistic nationalism, coverage of foreign news and the role of intellectuals – that produce a body of work about terrorism that is literally stunning in its unanimity of approach and renders laughable the duplicity of ‘public diplomacy’ – which if it were to work, should be based on dissent, not obedience! No conspiracy theories are needed to explain this unanimity – it derives from mundane policies to do with media economics and banal practices of nationalist ideology at a time of risk. Its impact, of course, is far from mundane or banal.

In the last ten years, the US media have gone from being controlled by 50 competing companies to 5 (Schechter 2003a). Many of these institutions are corporate conglomerates, for whom the traditions of journalism are incidental to their core businesses. News divisions have been fetishized as individual profit centres, rather than their previous function as loss-leaders that helped to give broadcast networks a character that ‘endorsed’ other genres (Smith 2003). So the major broadcast TV networks, still the principal sources of news for most of the US population, have closed investigative sections and foreign bureaux (Chester 2002:106). Where ABC News once maintained 17 foreign bureaux, it now has 7 (Higham 2001). Why? The moment that tobacco and real-estate expert Lawrence Tisch bought CBS in 1987, he commenced a programme of disinvestment and disemployment. Hundreds were fired from the news service following a budget cut of millions, and bureaux were closed in Europe and Asia. By 2001, CBS had 1 journalist covering all of Asia, and 7 others for the rest of the world. That became the model. All in all, network TV coverage of international news fell by 70 per cent from the 1970s to the 1990s. Between May 2000 and August 2001, 22 per cent of coverage was international – ten points below, for example, British and South African equivalents, and 20 points below German. Of that US coverage, just 3 per cent addressed US foreign policy (Barkin 2003:85; Schatz 2003: xvii). Numerous academic studies have found the networks parochial and essentially incapable of devoting attention to other countries other than as dysfunctional or as threats to the US, even when covering successful democratic elections (Golan and Wayne 2003). It should be no surprise that a major 2002 study of US newspapers with circulations of over 100,000 found 80 per cent of editors had negative views of the TV networks’ coverage of international stories (Pew International Journalism Program 2002). Of course, rather than acknowledge that this was driven by business priorities, US TV hacks turned to the putative power of the audience. In CBS anchor Dan Rather’s 2002 words: ‘if you lead foreign you die’, because ‘the public has lost interest in international reporting’ (quoted in Schechter 2003b: xl). This is too easy and self-serving an explanation. A 2002 survey of 218 US-newspaper editors found two-thirds admitting that their coverage of foreign news was ‘fair to poor’. It disclosed no real engagement with the multicultural and immigrant populations the papers were avowedly serving. This was in stark contrast to the satisfaction expressed over their coverage of commerce. The reason for this neglect of international news was not demand but supply – their readers were interested, but their owners sought to keep costs down, and their employees lacked the necessary skills (Pew Fellowships in International Journalism 2002; Pew International Journalism Program 2002). As usual, demand is a small part of the story – supply is the determining factor. But it would be wrong to divorce that from occupational ideology.

Journalistic nationalism

Whilst comparative studies indicate a propensity for journalists all over the world to reiterate foreign-policy nostra at times of national crisis, there are many honourable exceptions. But the US media stand out for their nationalism (Höijer et al. 2004:14). A glance at the transcript of a discussion about US terrorism coverage by the media, held in Ljubljana in November 2002, reveals a striking contrast between hyper-parochial representatives from Fox, CNN, NBC, and CBS and contributors from all other nations (Kroll and Champagne 2002). The proliferation of US flag pins on reporters, and the repeated, embarrassingly crass use of such othering Membership Categorization Devices as ‘we’, is simply not permitted by major global news gatherers, whether they are regionally or nationally based or funded. British viewers were so taken aback by the partisanship of Fox, which was rebroadcast there via satellite, that they protested against it through the local regulator, the Independent Television Commission. In India, where Star TV has long been dominant in ratings, the invasion of Iraq brought viewers flooding back to the hitherto moribund public broadcaster Doordarshan, while the Manila Standard explained to its readers that Fox was the contemporary version of the Bible for extremist Christians in the US, and Malaysia’s Berita Harian editorialized that the threat of terrorism has been deployed ‘by Bush’s accomplices to influence the [US] media not to question any government actions’ (Abaya 2004; BBC Monitoring International Reports 2004a; Sehgal 2003; Wells 2003).

The distinguished journalist-publisher Victor Navasky (2002) has noted that ‘post-September 11 journalism’ took as a donnée that ‘this was a time for rallying around the flag and that those who questioned national policy were giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. When Tom Guiting, editor-in-chief of the Texas City Sun, and Dan Guthrie, of the Daily Courier in Oregon, wrote articles criticizing Bush minor after the attack, they were fired (Ottosen 2004:117). Adducing connections between the attack and US foreign policy ‘somehow smacked of apologetics’ (Navasky 2002: xiii). After the president of ABC News, David Westin, told students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism that, as a journalist, he must refrain from taking a position on whether the September 11 attack on the Pentagon was legitimate, given that it could be regarded as a military target, the reaction from the right-wing media was so intense that he retracted his position and apologized (Alterman 2003:203). Dan Rather acknowledged (on the BBC) that US journalists ‘fear that you will be “necklaced” here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck…that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of tough questions’ (quoted in Solomon and Erlich 2003:23). In reviewing this period, the Newspaper Guild Communication Workers of America found that many of its members were expected to be ‘patriots first, and journalists second’ and were victimized if they failed to comply (International Federation of Journalists 2001:23–24).

Because MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield occasionally reported Arab perspectives during the 2003 conflict, Michael Savage, then a talk show host on her network prior to being removed for telling a caller he hoped the person would contract HIV, called her a ‘slut’, a ‘porn star’, and an ‘accessory to the murder of Jewish children’ on-air. NBC executives rewarded this conduct by naming him their ‘showman’ (quoted in Lieberman 2003). Banfield told a Kansas State University audience during the Iraq invasion that

horrors were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? …I was ostracized just for going on television and saying, ‘Here’s what the leaders of Hezbollah, a radical Moslem group, are telling me about what is needed to bring peace to Israel’.

(quoted in Schechter 2003a)

She was immediately demoted and disciplined by NBC for criticizing journalistic standards. Erik Sorenson, President of MSNBC, chortled that ‘one can be unabashedly patriotic and be a good journalist at the same time’ (quoted in Allan and Zelizer 2004:7). No wonder Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad accused the US of hypocrisy in its calls for a separation of media and state – ‘[w]hen it suits them, there is no freedom of the Press’. Similar critiques came from official Iranian sources, and the Turkish Daily News, when pointing to the slow, begrudging reactions of the US media and political classes to revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison (Aktan 2004; BBC Monitoring International Reports 2004b; New Straits Times 2003b).

When it was decided to co-opt journalists for the Iraq invasion by ‘embedding’ them with the military, reporters were required to sign a contract agreeing with Pentagon instructions on coverage, including no off-the-record interviews, which had been crucial in Vietnam. Magazine writer Michael Wolff questioned this practice, so Fox accused him of being unpatriotic, while talk radio’s resident recreational drug-use specialist Rush Limbaugh publicized his email address, leading to thousands of messages of hatred (Keeble 2004:50; Talara 2003; Thussu and Freedman 2003:6).

The noted CNN foreign correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, told CNBC after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled…I’m sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.

She was immediately derided by Fox’s Irena Briganti as ‘a spokeswoman for al Qaeda’ (quoted in Allan and Zelizer 2004:9 and Zerbisias 2003). Conversely, her frank assessment drew sighs of relief from the media elsewhere, increasingly incredulous in the face of their US counterparts’ performance. The New Straits Times editorialized that this pointed to the need for an alternative global news network for Muslims (New Straits Times 2003i).

The tendencies listed by Amanpour and exemplified by Briganti were not merely reactions to September 11. Their causes went deeper. For example, after the 2000 election, CNN’s Judy Woodruff had told Bush minor’s chief of staff Andy Card on-air that ‘we look forward to working with you’ (Woodruff quoted in Solomon 2001). This remark would not be altered by a journalist in most functioning democracies, where official sources are starting-points for work, not results – and the idea of ‘working with’ a government is seen as ‘Soviet-style’ (Massing 2001). But inside the US, there is a long heritage of reliance on official sources dating from the evolution of journalistic codes and norms as tools for monopolistic owners to distract attention from their market domination by focusing on non-partisan journalism and cloaking themselves in professionalism (Clark and McChesney 2001; Herman 1999:83, 87, 158; McChesney 2003). This quick-fix/idée fixe is a function of both a lengthy history, and more recent pressures from deregulation and concentration, as well as keen recruiting by the CIA, which has paid hundreds of US journalists, as approved by their seniors, but hidden from their readers (Boyd-Barrett 2004:38–39).

The White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon are referred to as ‘the Golden Triangle’ for reporters (Love 2003:246). Most US news gathering produces a feedback loop of staggeringly self-interested proportions. ‘Research’ is based on leaks and leads provided by the Administration, which then quotes the resulting stories as objective correlatives of its own position. That tendency reached its awful apogee in the weapons of mass destruction falsehoods perpetrated by Bush minor’s apparatchiks and the New York Times in 2003 – falsehoods of a cosmic magnitude, which drew zero public self criticism for an entire year, even as the paper was purging staff over invented fact checking on human interest stories (MacArthur 2003). As dissident writer Greg Palast (a dissident in the US, but a regular in the UK for the BBC and the Guardian) put it, ‘I can’t tell you how many reporters I’ve said, “Where do you get this stuff?” And they say, “Well, it was in a State Department press release”, as if that’s an acceptable source’ (Bosse and Palast 2003). Elsewhere, ‘[i]t’s not the job of a journalist to snap to the attention of generals’ (Fisk in Fisk et al. 2003), but that appears to be a qualification in the US.

The golden...

Table of contents

• Routledge Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 US journalism
• 2 Al Qaeda and the struggle for moderate Islam in Malaysia
• 3 Perning in the Gyre
• 4 The Philippines media
• 5 Shooting the messenger?
• 6 Uyghur separatism and nationalism in Xinjiang1
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index