By Danny Schechter
In the last week, mainstream media voices are turning a tad more critical and pointing to the gap between perception and reality.
OCTOBER 28
WHEN THE NEWS IS UNCRITICAL, COLUMNISTS ARE MORE OUTSPOKEN. While the news seems to strain to hit an upbeat tone, editorial columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of the New York Times are growing more skeptical. A Pundit Watch is in order, because as the editorial section goes, the tone of news reporting often follows. Dowd: "After one of the worst weeks in the capital's history, the question was suspended like a spore in the autumn air: Are we quagmiring ourselves again?" While Dowd doubts the war on one front, Rich was spraying sarcasm yesterday on progress in the war at home: "Of the more than 900 suspects arrested, exactly zero have been criminally charged in the World Trade Center attack (though one has died of natural causes, we're told, in a New Jersey jail cell). The Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second attack on America had begun until more than a week after the first casualty. . Given that this is the administration that was touted as being run with C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should be added to the growing list of Things That Have Not Changed Forever since Sept. 11. But let's not be so hasty. Not everything changes that fast — least of all Washington. The White House's home-front failures are not sudden, unpredictable products of wartime confusion but direct products of an ethos that has been in place since Jan. 20."
A CALL TO JOURNALISTS TO SPEAK OUT. Veteran Washington Post writer Ben Bagdikian, author of the classic book, "Media Monopoly," is the first to sign a petition to protest the growing press restrictions in the United States. It was initiated by San Francisco's Media Alliance and will be passed on to the powers that be in the administration, presumably including the White House and Pentagon. Here's an excerpt:
"It is during times of war and crisis that the importance of freedom of the press is most vital. During such times there is increased government pressure to restrict press freedom.
"We join together to remind the public that the media must report the truth--even when that truth challenges assertions that are made by the U.S. government..
"We, the undersigned journalists, editors, and media producers, call on publishers, owners of media outlets, and our colleagues to resist government intimidation, restrictions on information, and direct censorship, and to reject 'loyalty tests' and other actions which restrict media workers' ability to act in the interest of the public's right to know.
"We also call on the Bush Administration to cease its overt and covert interference with freedom of the press."
OCTOBER 29
GOVERNMENT NEWS MANAGEMENT. Yesterday I was on Larry Bensky's Sunday Salon program on KPFA, the Pacifica station in Berkeley, talking about government media strategies. Larry's other guest was Jacqueline E. Sharkey, a well-informed University of Arizona journalism professor who has written on the way the media was used in the Gulf War and is being subjected to the same playbook in this one. She has written about her findings on TomPaine.com: "The techniques used by the government to limit and shape news coverage — which have included prohibiting access to military operations and releasing misleading data about U.S. successes and casualties — bring up issues that go far beyond the obvious need to balance military secrecy requirements with the public's right to know. This information-control program has distorted accounts of what occurred during the military operations in Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf, has led to false perceptions about the operations' short- and long-term impact on these regions and on U.S. policy, and has threatened the historical record."
OCTOBER 31
A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE. Germany: On the flight over, I caught up with some newspaper stories I had missed. Most notably, there was a front page International Herald Tribune reprint of a Washington Post story on 20 secret talks over three years between the Taliban and U.S. representatives. The last took place just days before September 11th. One was held in Washington and involved a Taliban emissary bringing a rug as a gift for President Bush. I learned that the American representatives now feel that they blew it by not being willing to find an "aabroh," which is Pashto for a face-saving formula to induce the Afghan regime to hand over bin Laden. The U.S. kept demanding his arrest and the Taliban kept insisting on evidence first. The outcome was a stalemate. "We never heard what they were trying to say," said Milt Bearden, who ran the CIA's secret operations that supported the Mujadeen with their war against Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "We had no common language. Ours was 'give up bin Laden.' They were saying, do something to help us give him up." It is failures of communication like this that so often lead to wars.
NOVEMBER 2
AFRICAN SUCCESS. The Media Tenor organization, which is sponsoring the conference I am attending in Germany, gave its international TV prize this year for media diversity to the South African Broadcasting Corporation, a clear sign that media makers in other countries are not just looking to Western broadcast models as their paragons of excellence. Media monitors from this group, based in Bonn, but also in New York, Pretoria and three other cities, rated broadcasts by a variety of criteria. In their view, the SABC outclassed and outreported two prime-time BBC news programs and all the U.S. networks. When Matatha Tsetu, a veteran and respected editor turned TV journalist, accepted the award, he spoke of his network's efforts to give voice to the poor and voiceless in his country.
He later told me about the war he is most worried about, and that it is not in Central Asia. He explained how his country's soldiers and former President Nelson Mandela were engaged, at that moment, in helping to promote peace in the Central African nation of Burundi. Burundi had also had a genocidal ethnic conflict, and it was his hope that if its new transitional government, supported by soldiers from his homeland, works, it may provide a model for neighboring Rwanda. Let us not forget the million who were massacred there while most of the world fiddled and looked away. I tried to remember the last story I had seen about Burundi. CNN International (the global news service broadcast from Atlanta to the world but not to the U.S.) did devote one of their world news minutes to an image of Mandela on the scene there, while BBC World gave it slightly more time. He stressed that African news barely makes it onto our radar screen so I was happy that the Media Tenor conference made Africa a part of its agenda. Albina du Boisrouvray, the campaigner for AIDS orphans through her FXB foundation was here too, discussing how hard it is to get the plight of 40 million children onto the news agenda. She explained why so many oppressed and forgotten children are already becoming child soldiers and terrorists in training.
NOVEMBER 4
SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA! Feeding back to the media was part of my message here in Boston where I spoke today to the Alliance for Democracy confab at the Boston Public Library. I called on the assembled minions to stop bashing "THE MEDIA," as if they are one seamless monolith, and start seeking out more diverse sources. I also called on them to support independent media with their wallets as well as their mouths and reach out to the media and through the media rather than just talk to themselves.
What was welcome this week was a chance to sample coverage in Europe, where more diverse voices are being heard than here. Getting out of New York offered a respite from the hothouse of Yankee fantasies, battles between the Bravest and the Finest, and a political race in which media mogul Mike Bloomberg spreads millions of dollars like manna from heaven in an environment that is increasingly depressed economically and now, psychologically, by the loss of the World Series. It makes you worry about the efficacy of bombing when you see the mighty Bronx Bombers go down in defeat.
And finally, a word to honor the memory of Kathy Nguyen, who died last week in New York of inhalation anthrax although she has no known link to post offices or media companies. What tragic irony. She was a refugee from the Vietnam War plucked into another life from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975, only to perish as an innocent casualty in America's newest war. She fled South Vietnam's final media moment for the South Bronx, only to be driven into the glare of media attention in death. For me, she became a human link between the two wars, leading me to hope anew that history will not repeat itself.
— Danny Schechter is executive editor of MediaChannel.org. You can read his daily postings, from which these excerpts are drawn, in the News Dissector weblog.
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