Page 17 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

6 Toby Miller
‘misunderstanding’was responsible for the situation of the country internationally,
creating the White House Office of Global Communications and a Policy
Coordinating Committee on Strategic Communications. In 2002 they began
Radio Free Afghanistan. That year also saw the advent of Culture Connect, which
sent artists, writers, and musicians around the world to demonstrate US sophisti-
cation and decency and give young people a belief in their place in the world that
was to do with something other than violence. Radio Sawa and Radio Farda began
offering Arabic and Farsi language music and news. Later they developed TV
links. And the venerable Voice of America extended its Indonesian and Cantonese
programming (Center for Arts and Culture 2004: 8; Council on Foreign Relations
2003: 9, 27, 75; Schaefer 2004). I shall argue that, quite apart from the operation
of US foreign policy, this goal is improbable given the manifest way that the
US media operate as little more than a mouthpiece for official rhetoric in the
discourse of terrorism and state action.
I investigate in this chapter various forces at play in the coverage of the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 – notably journalistic nationalism, cov-
erage of foreign news and the role of intellectuals – that produce a body of work
about terrorism that is literally stunning in its unanimity of approach and renders
laughable the duplicity of ‘public diplomacy’ – which if it were to work, should
be based on dissent, not obedience! No conspiracy theories are needed to explain
this unanimity – it derives from mundane policies to do with media economics
and banal practices of nationalist ideology at a time of risk. Its impact, of course,
is far from mundane or banal.
In the last ten years, the US media have gone from being controlled by 50
competing companies to 5 (Schechter 2003a). Many of these institutions are cor-
porate conglomerates, for whom the traditions of journalism are incidental to
their core businesses. News divisions have been fetishized as individual profit
centres, rather than their previous function as loss-leaders that helped to give
broadcast networks a character that ‘endorsed’ other genres (Smith 2003). So the
major broadcast TV networks, still the principal sources of news for most of the
US population, have closed investigative sections and foreign bureaux (Chester
2002: 106). Where ABC News once maintained 17 foreign bureaux, it now has 7
(Higham 2001). Why? The moment that tobacco and real-estate expert Lawrence
Tisch bought CBS in 1987, he commenced a programme of disinvestment and
disemployment. Hundreds were fired from the news service following a budget
cut of millions, and bureaux were closed in Europe and Asia. By 2001, CBS had
1 journalist covering all of Asia, and 7 others for the rest of the world. That
became the model. All in all, network TV coverage of international news fell by
70 per cent from the 1970s to the 1990s. Between May 2000 and August 2001,
22 per cent of coverage was international – ten points below, for example, British
and South African equivalents, and 20 points below German. Of that US cover-
age, just 3 per cent addressed US foreign policy (Barkin 2003: 85; Schatz 2003:
xvii). Numerous academic studies have found the networks parochial and essen-
tially incapable of devoting attention to other countries other than as dysfunc-
tional or as threats to the US, even when covering successful democratic elections