Danny Schechter:  The American media used to have a phrase in the 70s called "Afghanistanism." The idea was that there are remote countries no one in America could possibly be interested in, and Afghanistan in that period was the symbol of those places. Why do you think Afghanistan for so long was sort of outside of the consciousness of many people?

Michael Griffin:  Well, for many very obvious reasons. It served as the battleground of the last year of the Cold War. It was in Afghanistan the Soviet Union was destroyed and ultimately collapsed. After the destruction of the Soviet Union frankly not only U.S. but also European interest was elsewhere, so Afghanistan was a kind of broken bone here. Nobody really cared what went on there. It had no power. It was invisible armies clashing by night, they weren't hurting anybody else, and it was only recently the United States real ized that if you leave these place as open sores and simply confine your interests to the occasional bit of relief grain, it can produce consequences that have much, much greater impact upon your lives.

Michael, since September 11, Afghanistan has been at the center of the news worldwide. The organizations that you study and have written about are now on everybody's lips. What kind of job do you think the media have done covering it?

I wrote the book primarily because even in 1996, when I first got the idea, it was obvious the Western press, the U.S. press, descended like seagulls upon garbage onto Afghanistan as soon as there was some interesting or strange turn of events, the Taliban being a specific example of that. The massacre of Wazio Shebi in 1997 is another example of something that attracts the Western press because of the inherited drama and interest. There is also a sense of the Western press as interested in the weird. When you get a country like Afghanistan, which is all weird, it has some pull, so the Germans come and they cover it in some detail. Then they go away to another story. Then they come back and they have to go through a whole learning curve again. And so, information is lost, as every time the Germans come back they are new Germans. So nobody really comes back, they are newcomers. So nobody is really connecting the dots in Afghanistan and nobody has been connecting the dots since 1992. In my book I tried to join up those dots. In a sense I was cannibalizing other people's reports, but if I had been an editor who for example had sent Germans into Afghanistan after the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I would have been inclined to keep some investigative team watching Al Qaeda and watching Osama bin Laden, and they didn't.

Before September 11, the media didn't talk a lot about Osama bin Laden. He hadn't been covered, right?

He had been covered in detail after the East Africa bombings. He was the FBI's number one wanted in the world. There were profiles all over the place. There was a lot of propaganda. There was a lot of hyperbole and description around his wealth, or his appearance, or his connections, or his involvement in terrorist scares all around the world. So it was an interesting story from the point of view of the reader and the writer. You could really write this guy up. Osama bin Laden was Robin Hood, he was the old man on the mountain, he was somehow the Jackal. It was wonderful! The failure of the U.S. press to actually put teams of people on the Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda network over three or four years was reflected in the U.S. intelligence failures do anything about it — since let's say the first attempt on the World Trade Center back in 1993. And from the point of view of the Western media, I suspect that this was because of their really poor discrimination of what deserves a press link in terms of resources. You get your really good example of how the trials — right here in Manhattan — of the terrorists involved in those East African bombings were overlooked because Puffy, some rap star, is being tried in the same courts. There are a thousand journalists looking in the opposite direction in the same court, to this really significant story of the Al Qaeda.

In your book you look at the background and the culture of Afghanistan and how the Taliban movement emerged and developed. What are we not learning from this kind of superficial media coverage that seems to demonize Osama bin Laden as Mr. Evil and President Bush as Mr. Good?

I think probably from the American media's point of view there is no greater interest in what happens after the Taliban so long as the U.S. gets its man Osama — kills him or captures him. America will kind of have fulfilled its mission in terms of its readers. I think that is to really misrepresent and misapprehend what's going on in Afghanistan. American media that I have been appearing on since I got to New York about five days ago is interested in the what-happens-next scenario. And even if you don't know what happens next, if you can make up something that is going to happen, they're happy. Yesterday people were asking me if Osama bin Laden has the capacity to inflict a nuclear attack on the this country. The answer of course is that I don't know, but the sought-for answer is "yes, he does." Where is Osama going next? Well, he hasn't called me to tell. In fact, that is another reason why people are not that interested in Afghanistan. It is more complicated than the stock exchange. If you really do want to understand about Afghanistan — not terribly many people do — you have to go down there.

Do you think the American media, world media, can handle only one story at a time? In other words, there can't be this happening and then this happening.

It is not just the U.S. media. It is also the UK media. When Princess Diana died, all the news was a single voice newsroom from the BBC on every news service, and it was as if the world ceased to exist. And I think the same thing happened here. Even without the impact of September 11th, there is this feeling that you can only deploy so many journalist on so many advertising, revenue-yielding stories at one time. News stories — and certainly war stories more than other stories — but the deployment of journalists throughout the world is no longer a realistic economic possibility for most American or British media.

You worked on an index on censorship, monitoring censorship issues around the world. Many people are alarmed about the media management taking place inside the United States, the information policies of the Pentagon. Is that a serious problem?

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