- WASHINGTON - People seeking
relatively balanced reporting about the international dimensions of the
crisis set off by last month's terrorist attacks on the United States knew
they were in trouble when they heard CBS anchorman Dan Rather react to
President George W Bush's vow to wage a "war against
terrorism".
-
- "George Bush is the president, he makes the
decisions
and, you know, as just one American, [if] he wants me to line up, just
tell me where," Rather - considered one of the networks' feistier
veterans - told his vast television audience.
-
- It was an ill omen for press independence, which suffered
yet another blow after a 30-minute conference call on Wednesday between
the executives of the major US networks and Bush's National Security
Adviser,
Condoleezza Rice. The executives, representing the news wings of ABC, CBS,
NBC and Fox - as well as two international broadcasters, MSNBC and CNN
- agreed that they would not broadcast live or in their entirety any future
videotaped statements by Osama bin Laden or anyone in his Al-Qaeda
organisation,
which Washington has named as the prime suspect in the attacks on New York
and the Pentagon.
-
- They further agreed that, to the extent such statements
are considered "newsworthy", they will be substantially edited,
and anything in them that the government might consider inflammatory will
be deleted.
-
- "After hearing Dr Rice, we're not going to step
on the land mines she was talking about," Walter Isaacson, CNN's news
chairman, told the New York Times, while another executive described the
broadcasters' decision as motivated by "patriotism".
-
- Media critics reacted with disappointment but little
surprise. "The television networks are kind of running scared in the
sense of being very cautious about putting anything on the air that's
controversial
or that might be seen as unpatriotic by either their advertisers or a lot
of their audience," said Daniel Hallin, a political scientist at the
University of California at San Diego.
-
- Hallin, who wrote an authoritative history of television
coverage of the Vietnam War, stressed that the networks' acquiescence in
the government's efforts to manage what the public sees and hears is
nothing
new. "The media, and especially television, have always been wary
about broadcasting the voice of the enemy, particularly in war-time,"
he said.
-
- "When America goes to war, so does the American
press, as pumped up with pride, fear and anxiety as any trooper,"
wrote Marvin Kalb, a former CBS News reporter, in the Washington Post on
Thursday.
-
- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters shortly after the September 11 attacks that the current crisis required that
everyone
"watch what they say". At the time, he was rebuking a late-night
television comic's remarks that launching cruise missiles 3,000 kilometers
from their targets was more "cowardly" than flying an airliner
into the World Trade Center, as the terrorists had done.
-
- Fleischer later insisted that he was not trying to act
as censor but the administration's subsequent efforts at news management
and restricting the flow of information - even to Congress - suggest his
words were prophetic.
-
- Bush himself ordered top officials this week to restrict
classified briefings to only the eight top Congressional leaders. The
unprecedented
move was taken in retaliation for an alleged leak by a still-unknown
lawmaker
of a statement by one briefing official that another terrorist attack
against
the United States was certain.
-
- Although Bush agreed on Wednesday to authorize classified
briefings for all members of several key committees, his initial instinct
to deny information to elected officials appeared to reflect a broader
tendency within the administration.
-
- Two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in
discussing possible leaks, quoted British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill's
famous words that "in wartime, truth is so precious that she should
always be attended by a bodyguard of lies".
-
- Rumsfeld catapulted to national prominence as Pentagon
chief during the notoriously secretive administration of Richard Nixon.
Vice President Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, ran the government's
virtually seamless news-management strategy during the Gulf War 10 years
ago, when reporters were kept virtually imprisoned in briefing rooms in
Dahran, Saudi Arabia, and at the Pentagon for the duration of the
campaign.
-
- Secretary of State Colin Powell, who became a media star
during the Gulf War when he served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the
Armed Forces, also has shown a penchant for news management. Last week,
he declined to testify in public before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee
but instead invited the committee's members to lunch with him at the State
Department for a private chat.
-
- Early in the crisis, Powell reportedly asked the Emir
of Qatar, who has a dominant share in the Al Jazeera TV network, which
broadcasts throughout the Arab world, to ensure that the station's
broadcasts
were not inflaming anti-US sentiment. It is from Al Jazeera that the US
networks obtained bin Laden's videotapes.
-
- The White House said its request to the US networks was
based on two considerations. "At best, Osama bin Laden's message is
propaganda calling on people to kill Americans," Fleischer told
reporters
on Wednesday. "At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers
to initiate such attacks."
-
- US officials said they are studying all of bin Laden's
tapes for indications that he is delivering coded messages to so-called
"sleeper" agents to carry out terrorist attacks, a notion which
most analysts dismiss as far-fetched, particularly because alleged sleeper
agents would have access to the Internet, where they could see the complete
videotapes from other sources besides the US networks.
-
- As for the propaganda argument, independent experts argue
that this, too, makes little sense. "It's silly to imagine that
Western
public opinion is going to be manipulated by bin Laden's videos,"
according to Hallin. "His intended audience is in the Arab
world."
-
- Jeff Cohen, a media analyst and founder of Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a watchdog group, agreed, adding that what
bin Laden says is "very newsworthy. He's an evil guy who's exploiting
real resentments towards the US in the Arab world, and the public needs
to know what he's saying."
-
- Other analysts expressed concern about the fact that
the television executives responded to a government request. "This
could be a slippery slope," according to William Dorman, who teaches
journalism at California State University in Sacramento. "It can lead
to a frame of mind where they will accept some other limitation that's
suggested by the government that's far more serious."
-
- "If the press starts giving in to the
administration,
it makes it far more difficult for Congress and independent groups to
express
independent points of view," he added.
-
- Inter Press Service ©2001
Asia Times Online Co.
Ltd. Room 6301
The Center
99 Queen's Road
Central, Hong Kong.
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