Page 130 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Conclusion 119
mobilise large numbers of people. However there are inherent problems in
distributing such material clandestinely, which works to limit its accessibility.
Through using violence to access the mainstream media, the majority of the
groups and communities covered by this book have demonstrated an ability to set
the media agenda. Using violence is a particularly effective device in the short term,
and provided these groups and communities can sustain a consistent level of vio-
lence, it can enable them to exert influence over the media agenda for prolonged
periods of time. But violence is a fairly blunt instrument for setting the media
agenda. It can ensure access, but it does not guarantee the necessary influence over
media outputs. It is significant that none of these groups and communities, with the
partial exception of the Hindu rioters in Gujarat, has really been able to use the root
causes of their violence, their objectives, or their ideologies, to control the media
agenda and positively influence its outputs. In Gujarat, the Hindu rioters were only
able to achieve this to a limited extent through the two local newspapers which sup-
ported their ideology. Gaining publicity for these issues is supposed to flow from
setting the media agenda through violence, but this is often not the case because
reporting tends to focus in on the act of violence. Instead, governments and the
other vested interests which exercise influence over the media in these states, have
a much higher level of control over its outputs. As a result, only a few of the groups
and communities covered by this book, such as the CPP-NPA and the MILF in the
Philippines, are able to exert even limited influence over media outputs.

The media and the ‘war on terror’ in Asia

One of the main goals of the US media strategy in the wake of 9/11 was to control
the international media agenda on ‘terrorism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’, particu-
larly through transnational media providers such as CNN. This strategy has had
some success in Asia because one of the most disturbing features of the reporting
of indigenous conflicts by the mainstream national media in China and the
Philippines, is the way that it links those conflicts with the ‘war on terror’. This
reporting gives an erroneous impression of these conflicts, raising issues about
the legitimacy of the causes that the various groups and communities are fighting
for, and helping to generate expectations over how to deal with them.
In contrast, the media in Malaysia and Indonesia, under the influence of their
respective governments, have worked to de-link their indigenous conflicts from the
‘war on terror’, despite the fact that the US has tried to draw both states into the
‘war’, by putting JI and the KMM on its list of foreign terrorist organisations. This
reflects the opposition of these two states to the wider ‘war on terror’ but also a
desire to downplay the threat of Islamic extremism within their borders. This
illustrates the limitations of the globalised media for disseminating US messages.
Despite its best efforts therefore, the US has failed to win the ‘battle of ideas’
with al Qaeda in Asia, because its counter-terror messages and its perspective on
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are rarely reported directly in the Asian
media. This is largely because with the possible exception of the Philippines, the
US media has been discredited in the states covered by this book, due to the