By Danny Schechter
As most MediaChannel visitors know, your News Dissector has been using a weblog to post daily dissections and extracts of media coverage worldwide. I am doing it seven days a week, called by sense of duty and, I am sure, driven by an obsession. The media role in this conflict is so central to our understanding of what is going on, and yet so limited in terms of access and context. The newscasts blare on day and night with constant updates but what I sense is growing fear and frustration among viewers. The impression much of this news conveys may be also be false, or at least one-dimensional. That's why I have been devoting a chunk of my day to watch as much of it as I can and feed back in a timely manner. I try to include reports from different countries, diverse sources and a variety of vantage points. Fortunately, I have the space, but I am not sure how many readers have the time or attention span to read all of it. That's why we have asked editor Elinor Nauen to do a weekly digest in lieu of my usual column. You can plow through the originals on the dissector's weblog.
OCTOBER 19
"WE WILL NOT FLINCH, BEND OR SWERVE." You could hear the echo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as CBS News anchor Dan Rather virtually recycled the WW II president's famous line "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Rather, known for grand eloquence and gushing hyperbole, may have been trying to top FDR with his declaration at a CBS News conference held yesterday to respond to reports that his assistant — still unnamed, but "British born," according to London papers — has been infected with the milder form of anthrax. The anchor said, fear not anthrax, is what worries him. "We will not flinch, we will not bend, we will not swerve" was his fighting phrase, uttered in white short sleeves and sitting next to his similarly attired boss Andrew Heyward, while announcing that the news, a "classy newscast" as he called it, would go on. "Just two regular guys in white shirts and ties," quipped NY Post columnist Adam Buckman, who also pointed out, "They were even on multiple channels — Fox News, MSNBC, CNN — but, curiously, not on CBS." CBS, you will recall, refused to preempt a rerun of the "I Love Lucy" show years ago for an important Senate hearing on the Vietnam War. Observers also noted with praise that unlike with network colleagues who also suffered anthrax exposure, there were no PR flacks present at this media event.
WHY ARE THE MEDIA IN THE CROSSFIRE? Because we live in "one nation under television," where the news anchors are national symbols and the TV news screen is like the church we all worship in. Terrorists know that the media has more power than most politicians, especially the power to reinforce a national mood. And that's also why politicians want the media to play the role of megaphone and rally the people to support their leaders in this hour of need etc. The late media writer Ed Diamond, an old friend of mine, wrote about a colleague of the political columnist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), who he accused of "always dredging up basic principles." Noted Diamond in his book "The Tin Gazoo": "'That won't do in daily journalism.' The colleague explained and offered this metaphor: A piano has eight octaves, a violin three and a bugle only four notes. 'Now if what you've got to play is a bugle,' the friend concluded, 'there isn't any sense in camping down in front of piano music.' 'You may be right,' Lippmann replied. 'But I am not going to spend my life writing bugle calls.'" Let's hope that more voices in the media understand that they have a duty to play more than bugle calls too — especially in wartime when bugle calls rouse warriors and silence critics. One of the problems, given the lack of international coverage over the years, is that you can't blame most people for not being critical. As longtime propaganda analysts Ed Herman and David Peterson write: "Thanks to the effectiveness of the U.S. propaganda system, U.S. citizens by and large are caught within the epistemic bind of not knowing that they do not know."
OCTOBER 20
WHEN NETWORKS BECOME CRIME SCENES. NPR's "On The Media" show this morning reports on the difficulty most networks have had in covering the attacks on themselves. Reuven Frank, a former NBC president, says the network should respond like a company not a news organization. Media monitor Andrew Tyndall says that NBC's coverage on the issue was initially wrong, reporting that the infected letter to Tom Brokaw was postmarked Florida when it turned out to have come through New Jersey, and that the network relied on unnamed sources, without corroboration from its own security people.
OCTOBER 22
THE LATEST DISPUTE ON THE BATTLEFIELD. On the war front, a dispute is making news as I write on this Monday morning. CNN is reporting that the Taliban, with parts of aircraft debris in hand, claim that they shot down a U.S. helicopter. The Pentagon insists it is not true. Surely, controversies like this matter very little in the scheme of things. A war usually implies the presence of two armed forces, each with the capacity to cause damage to each other, and with each making claims that require independent verification. The blow-by-blow coverage and tit-for-tat claims reported from afar is not always very helpful in reaching any deeper understanding or in getting distance from the nonstop cycles of constantly updated info. What should we be asking? I received a notice of an upcoming military and diplomatic briefing that poses more basic questions of the kind that media outlets themselves need to be asking:
"Is the war in Afghanistan a winnable war?
"What regional and global impact might we see?
"What are the domestic costs of ensuring safety?
"What are the root causes of terrorism?
"What are the long-term obstacles to this fight?"
OCTOBER 23
PILGER ATTACKS "LOBOTOMIZED" MEDIA'S COVERAGE OF WAR. Britain's veteran campaigning journalist John Pilger has accused sections of the Western media of behaving like "government lackeys" during the current war against the Taliban. Pilger told a meeting of Media Workers against the War: "There is already a long list of 'intelligence' and 'diplomatic' lies that emerged after the Gulf War and other conflicts. But we are seeing the same thing over again. It's as if there is a traditional lobotomy that journalists seem to have to undergo every time the political leaders feel they want to go out somewhere and bomb people." Is this true? Is he exaggerating? Increasingly, U.S. media outlets are reporting on the media restrictions but without, to my knowledge, any official complaints or aggressive protest lobbying by media companies.
CENSORSHIP IS BACK — IN CHINA. Add these item to your file on how much the world, and media, have NOT changed since September 11. The Washington Post reports that blocks on Internet websites of foreign news organizations — including the CNN, the BBC, Reuters and The Washington Post — were reinstituted in China after the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting earlier this month in Shanghai. But while Western sources are blocked in China. Chinese propaganda news is being welcomed in the U.S. by AOL TimeWarner in an "exchange": They get "Miami Vice"; we get the thoughts of Jiang Zemin.
OCTOBER 26
REALITY TV RUNS INTO A NEW REALITY. When "Survivor" debuted in the summer of 2000, it was a tremendous success, spawning many imitators. Now more than a year has passed. Reality shows are on the schedule of most broadcast and cable networks. But, with the new reality ushered in by the events of September 11, these shows haven't been doing well.
AL-JAZEERA TO GO ONLINE IN ENGLISH. The Online Journalism Review reports that the controversial Arabic language satellite TV station dubbed "the CNN of the Arab World" will go online in English within a year, since more than 40 percent of the site's visitors are from the U.S. I would welcome critiques of Al-Jazeera's coverage from Arabic- speaking readers. As we all know, the Qatar-based broadcaster is called the "CNN of the Arab World." Yet as a former CNN producer and occasional critic, that's not a great recommendation in my eyes. In principle I welcome more perspectives in the media mix, but all need great levels of transparency and accountability.
This is a brief glimpse of what I have been touching on. But I am not alone. Many readers are sending in items and sharing observations based on media monitoring of their own. Why not join them? Write: dissector@mediachannel.org.
— Danny Schechter is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org. His latest book is "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics, 1960-2000," from Akashic Books.
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