War and the Media

Reporting Conflict 24/7

Daya Kishan Thussu, Des Freedman, Daya Kishan Thussu, Des Freedman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761943136, 9780761943129
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

`No book is more timely than this collection, which analyses brilliantly the Western media?s relentless absorption into the designs of dominant, rapacious power? - John Pilger

`A most timely book, with many valuable insights? - Martin Bell O.B.E

`It has long been known that the outcome of war is deeply influenced by the battle to win ?hearts and minds?. This book provides a stimulating set of perspectives which combine the analyses of prominent academics with the experiences of leading journalists? -

Professor Tom Woodhouse, University of Bradford

`This volume represents an all-star cast of authors who have a tremendous amount of knowledge about media and world conflict. One of its strengths is that it doesn?t focus entirely narrowly on media, but puts the discussion of media issues in the context of changes in the world order in military doctrine? -

Professor Daniel C. Hallin, University of California

`This book comes just in time. A coherent and wide-ranging collection of data, analyses and insights that help our understanding of the complex interaction between communication and conflict. A major intellectual contribution to critical thinking about the early 21st century? - Cees J Hamelink, Professor International Communication, University of Amsterdam

With what new tools do governments manage the news in order to prepare us for conflict?

Are the media responsible for turning conflict into infotainment?

Is reporting gender specific?

How do journalists view their role in covering distant wars?

This book critically examines the changing contours of media coverage of war and considers the complexity of the relationship between mass media and governments in wartime.

Assessing how far the political, cultural and professional contexts of media coverage have been affected by 9/11 and its aftermath, the volume also explores media representations of the `War on Terrorism? from regional and international perspectives, including new actors such as the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera - the pan-Arabic television network.

One key theme of the book is how new information and communication technologies are influencing the production, distribution and reception of media messages. In an age of instant global communication and round-the-clock news, powerful governments have refined their public relations machinery, particularly in the way warfare is covered on television, to market their version of events effectively to their domestic as well as international viewing public.

Transnational in its intellectual scope and in perspectives, War and the Media includes essays from internationally known academics along with contributions from media professionals working for leading broadcasters such as BBC World and CNN.

Part 1

COMMUNICATING CONFLICT IN A GLOBAL WORLD

1

CONTEXTUALIZING CONFLICT: THE US ‘WAR ON TERRORISM’*

Aijaz Ahmad

The date of September 11 has a powerful resonance in the annals of modern history. In 1973, on this day, the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored coup of General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvadore Allende in Chile and established a regime of terror which killed an estimated 35,000 people in the first few weeks and continued to brutalize Chilean society for some two decades. September 11 was also the date of the Camp David Accords (1978), which signalled Egypt’s final surrender to US imperialism and Israeli Zionism, leaving the Palestinians at the mercy of the latter. And, September 11, 1990 was the day when George H. Bush, father of the current President of the United States, made his fateful speech to the US Congress announcing the war against Iraq – that supreme act of terror which killed an estimated 200,000 people in the course of that brief assault and which has led to the death of at least half a million Iraqi children over the next decade, thanks to the US-dictated blockade of their country.

Betrayal of the Palestinians, the destruction of Iraq. One can reasonably assume that these two great devastations of the Arab-Muslim world were vivid in the memory of those 19 hijackers on 11 September 2001, when they commandeered four civilian aircraft owned by two major US airlines, and smashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – nerve centres of US financial and military power – while committing collective suicide in the process. The White House – the seat of US political power – was probably to be struck by the fourth aircraft but something in the hijackers’ plan went awry. More than 3,000 innocent civilians from 60 countries – some 500 of them from South Asia alone, including the son of a close friend of mine – died within a couple of hours in a calculated and hideous act of terrorism carried out with stunning technical precision.

The deaths in New York pale in comparison with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed 220,000 lives – the most famous of the numerous cities that the US destroyed in the ‘long’ and violent twentieth century. This was the first time the Americans came to experience what it means for cities to be at the receiving end of such destructive force. This hijacking operation, carried out by less than two dozen individuals, was the largest attack on mainland United States in its history, larger than Pearl Harbor, while American armies, assassins and covert operators of all kinds have been active around the globe for well over a century.

Being at the receiving end of violence on their own soil was such a novel experience for the US centres of power, that this attack on a couple of buildings at the heart of the imperial centre produced effects that no amount of terror and destruction in the outposts – or even the secondary and tertiary centres – of the empire could have produced. An economy that was already slowing down went into a fully-fledged downturn, and the week following the hijackers’ attack proved to be the worst in the history of US finance since 1933.

What happened was unspeakably hideous, cruel and senseless. The loss of thousands of precious lives, many of them cut down in the flower of their youth, has neither a moral nor a political justification. For once, President Bush’s speechwriter was right: those who carry out such acts in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah; they hijack Islam in the name of Islam; in the larger, largely humane world of Islam, they are a dangerous, fringe element.

The new global militarism

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George Bush first called it a ‘crusade’, then a ‘War for Civilization’, then ‘A Task that Never Ends’, then a ‘War against Global Terror’, then a ‘Titanic War on Terror’. The rhetorical inflation and the fudging of facts is infinite. It is supposed to be all about September 11 and Al-Qaeda, but senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been quoted as saying that ‘Al-Qaeda itself, we know, is less than 200’ (Palm Beach Post, 27 July 2002): two hundred members, including those held by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Undeterred by facts asserted by his own officials, Bush claimed at just about the same time: ‘We know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us.’ Vice-president Dick Cheney continues to speak of a war against ‘40 to 50 countries’; down from 60 or so that Bush had estimated in September 2001. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld intones that he has instructed the Pentagon to ‘think the unthinkable’, that is, the actual use of nuclear weapons.

The US has a long history of overt and covert interventions around the globe with the explicit aim of overthrowing existing governments. The Islamicist jihad in Afghanistan, which eventually gave rise to the Taliban, was itself the product of such a policy, which was aimed at overthrowing the government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the policy had come into force well before the Soviet Union had intervened militarily to defend that government. In more recent years, such a policy was implemented successfully in Yugoslavia and unsuccessfully in Somalia. What is new is a certain globalization of this policy, a declaration that the US has the unique right to make war against any and all governments that it considers inimical to its interests, and the notice that has been served upon the world to either support this policy or face retribution. Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, who does the US bidding in such matters, has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

With dozens of new military bases and facilities established from Turkmenistan to the Philippines, the occupation of Afghanistan accomplished, the destruction of Palestinians going on and on, and a full-scale war against Iraq being planned by the US administration, attention has been focused quite rightly on the global nature of this perpetual war.

Taking advantage of the anger and the human anguish arising from the September 11 tragedy, the US administration moved quickly to plan a new, globalized, permanent war; to expound what amounts to a new doctrine of America’s right to use its might as it pleases; to expand the war-making powers of the Presidency; to put in place a new regime of infinite surveillance; and to demolish whatever restraints had been introduced after the Vietnam War on America’s right to undertake assassinations and covert actions across the globe. All this was accompanied with hair-raising rhetoric, which tended at times to portray the war as a clash between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim civilizations.

Bush called his ‘war on terrorism’ a ‘crusade’ early on, with no sense of the historical meaning of that word. Only opposition from a wide spectrum of opinion in the Muslim world made him retract that stance and start saying that the war was not against Islam as such but only against certain Muslims. Not to be outdone, the Pentagon named its planned operation ‘Infinite Justice’, a phrase not even from the Bible but from the lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. Not only Muslims but even liberal Christians were outraged, and Protestant pastors themselves pointed out that ‘Infinite Justice’ referred to God’s own divine justice, an attribute that no human power ought to claim for itself, America’s vision of its own omnipotence notwithstanding. The Pentagon sheepishly promised to reconsider the code name.

Congress swiftly passed a resolution authorizing Bush to use wide powers in pursuit of this war on terrorism, asserting that ‘all necessary and appropriate force’ could be used against nations, organizations and individuals. No nations or organizations were named, let alone individuals; the President could determine which one was to be attacked as he went along. Nor was there a time limit; he was authorized to act against present danger as well as in anticipation of ‘future attacks’. The powers were in some ways wider than a mere declaration of war could have bestowed, since such a declaration would name the country against which the war was to be waged.

Echoing John Foster Dulles, the rabid foreign secretary of the Eisenhower years, who said that non-alignment – the path of some Third World countries like India during the Cold War – was ‘immoral’, Bush too has put the whole world on notice: if you do not explicitly join us in this global crusade, we shall treat you as a hostile country! Enemies are lurking in thousands of little corners, in dozens of countries across the globe, and America will choose its targets as well as its methods and timing of dealing with them as it goes along, according to its own convenience; every country must join up each time, or else it too becomes an enemy and perhaps the next target. This war, ‘unlike any we have ever seen,’ he said, shall be perpetual but largely secret. Some of it shall be seen on television, he said, but much shall go unrevealed – even in success, he emphasized. Congressional leaders in Washington are now talking of putting the CIA ‘on a war footing’ and cite with admiration the Israeli example of an open policy of assassinations without regard to legal niceties.

It is quite astonishing, though predictable, how quickly one government after another has fallen in line. India of course joined the crusade and offered its airspace and naval facilities with shameless alacrity. Pakistan President Parvez Musharraf then cited India’s pre-emptive oath of allegiance as his reason for offering the same to the US; India would otherwise have a strategic edge, he reasoned. Competitive servilities, one might say.

Tony Blair, who acts as Washington’s agent while doubling as the British prime minister, flew across the Atlantic to register his presence at the moment of birth of this new era of perpetual war. The European Commission has been scurrying around formulating new policies of cooperation over the question of terrorism, urging individual members of the European Union to allocate more funds and build new systems of surveillance. The Russian parliament has passed a bill to create an international body to fight terrorism and, aping the US president, calls for the elimination of terrorists as well as the governments which are said to finance them.

China has been more shrewd, somewhat more independent; it urges a policy that involves presentation of concrete evidence, does not involve sacrifice of innocent civilians and is within the bounds of international law, but it also promises cooperation if the US was more receptive to its interests in Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang – and on the issue of National Missile Defence. The US, in turn, moved quickly and put in place a new deal facilitating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

The less powerful, many of whom also happen to be directly involved – in some cases even directly targeted – are of course treated differently. On 14 September 2001, William Burns, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, called in the ambassadors of 15 Arab countries, including Syria, which is otherwise one of the ‘target’ states, as well as the PLO, and imperiously read out to them a list of actions they were to undertake, including the arrest and prosecution of those on their soil who the US designates as ‘terrorists’. Everyone seems to have fallen in line, including Yasser Arafat, who has extended ‘full cooperation’. Even President Mohammed Khatami of Iran has made sympathetic noises and expressed the wish to use the occasion to draw closer to the US.

Terrorism and the emerging neo-imperialism

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Such is the asymmetry of power in our time: those who rule the universe shall be victorious against the poorest and the most wretched of this earth; those who refuse subjugation shall be made to suffer miseries that no previous period in human history inflicted on the powerless. War shall be permanent because the war cannot end without justice and justice is what the US has set out to deny, permanently. The war shall be globalized because in this period of globalization there is a singular power whose task it is to guarantee regimes of injustice throughout the world. And much of this war shall be secret, like much of the movements of finance capital because finance capital is what this war serves and therefore imitates. Bush is right: this is truly ‘a task that has no end’ – until someone rises to end it.

A brief word about this particular form of fighting which is called ‘terrorism’. Bush was careful enough to say that America’s enemy was a particular ‘terrorism’ which ‘has global reach’. In other words, he is not particularly concerned with the great many varieties, which include the Roman Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Ireland and the largely Hindu Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. Nor is ‘fundamentalism’ the issue: Taliban fundamentalism is bad but Saudi fundamentalism is good, and Bush himself of course speaks the language of that Christian fundamentalism which defines the far-right in contemporary United States. ‘Terrorism with global reach,’ the designated enemy, is the one that can challenge American power.

This is a complex and important subject. Briefly put, ‘terrorism’ is what comes when the Communist left and anti-colonial nationalism have both been defeated while the issue of imperialism remains unresolved and more important than ever. Hatred takes the place of revolutionary ideology. Privatized, retail violence takes the place of revolutionary warfare and national liberation struggles. Millenarian and freelance seekers of religious martyrdom replace the defeated phalanx of disciplined revolutionaries. Unreason arises where reason is appropriated by imperialism and is eliminated in its revolutionary form.

There were no Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan before the Americans created them as a counterweight against the secular left. Islamism arose in Iran to fill that space which had been left vacant with the elimination of the secular, revolutionary left by the CIA-sponsored regime of the Shah. Islamic secret societies arose in Egypt after imperialism and Zionism combined to defeat Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular nationalist project. The Hamas arose in Palestine because the cosmopolitan Palestinian nationalism was denied its dream of a secular state in the historic land of Palestine where Jew and Arab could live as equals. What gets called ‘terrorism with global reach’ today is a mirror of defeat but also the monster that imperialism’s Faustian success made possible and which now haunts its own creator. The loss of over 3,000 lives in the blaze and collapse of the World Trade Center is the price the victims and their families paid for the victory of imperialism.

America can never defeat ‘terrorism with a global reach’ because for all its barbarity and irrationality, religiously motivated ‘terrorism’ is also a ‘sigh of the oppressed’, and if some Palestinians cheered it, that too was owed to the fact that even an ‘opiate of the people’ is sometimes mistaken for the medicine itself. The only way to end this ‘terrorism’ is to rebuild that revolutionary movement of the left whose place it occupies and with whose mantle it masquerades.

Authoritarianism at home

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The ‘war on terrorism’ has a significant domestic dimension. Bush was always a candidate of what is the ultra-right wing even within the Republican Party. However, the constraint on his ability to act on their agenda came from the fact that even his election was barely legal and his popularity ratings, low to start with, had kept declining. At the time of the September 11 events, that rating stood at 40 per cent. Popularity soared with his speech declaring a global ‘war on terror’ and rose to over 90 per cent after the bombing of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001. Permanent war hysteria has been used to maintain exceedingly high popularity ratings, which in turn have been used to implement that agenda. Alain Joxe, head of CIRPES (the Paris-based centre for interdisciplinary research in areas of peace and strategic studies) wrote in Le Monde on 17 December 2001 that ‘the American leadership is presently shaped by dangerous right wing Southern extremists’. These ‘extremists’ are connected, in turn, with the fact that the American South is home both to a hard core of the evangelical Christian fundamentalist constituency which is represented by the Republican right and the core of the military-industrial complex comprising the oil interests and the war industries.

Bush is connected with that whole constituency. He was governor of the oil-rich southern state of Texas and his family has been closely associated with the oil interests. As for the military significance of the South, CounterPunch (20 June 2002) summarized it as follows: ‘The South represents only a third of the nation’s population, but supplies 42 per cent of the country’s enlisted soldiers.… Southern politicians are Congress’s biggest hawks, tilting US foreign policy away from peace and diplomacy. 62 per cent of southern senators scored in the bottom fifth of the legislative scorecard for Peace Action, a non-profit watchdog. Anchored by defence boom centres in Virginia, Texas and Florida, the South produces more weapons than any other region, landing 43 per cent of US arms contracts in 2001.’ Significantly, over two-thirds of the arms used by Israel come from southern arms corporations. These realities play an important role in the current drift into greater militarism and authoritarianism.

Congress itself gave Bush the authority to concentrate extraordinary powers in the office of the President, more or less indefinitely. Gore Vidal, the 77-year-old novelist and veteran commentator, described the US legislature most aptly as ‘a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy.’ Immediately after September 11 this ‘supine Congress’ passed a Bill, 420–1 in the House and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the editors
• Notes on contributors
• List of figures and tables
• Introduction Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman
• Part 1 Communicating conflict in a global world
• Part 2 New dimensions of managing conflict
• Part 3 Reporting conflict in the era of 24/7 news
• Part 4 Representations of conflict – 9/11 and beyond
• Part 5 Conflict and the cultures of journalism
• Subject index
• Author index