Page 19 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

8 Toby Miller
Sun, and Dan Guthrie, of the Daily Courier in Oregon, wrote articles criticizing
Bush minor after the attack, they were fired (Ottosen 2004: 117). Adducing con-
nections between the attack and US foreign policy ‘somehow smacked of apolo-
getics’(Navasky 2002: xiii). After the president of ABC News, David Westin, told
students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism that, as a jour-
nalist, he must refrain from taking a position on whether the September 11 attack
on the Pentagon was legitimate, given that it could be regarded as a military tar-
get, the reaction from the right-wing media was so intense that he retracted his
position and apologized (Alterman 2003: 203). Dan Rather acknowledged (on the
BBC) that US journalists ‘fear that you will be “necklaced” here, you will have a
flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck...that keeps journalists
from asking the toughest of tough questions’ (quoted in Solomon and Erlich
2003: 23). In reviewing this period, the Newspaper Guild Communication
Workers of America found that many of its members were expected to be ‘patriots
first, and journalists second’ and were victimized if they failed to comply
(International Federation of Journalists 2001: 23–24).
Because MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield occasionally reported Arab perspectives
during the 2003 conflict, Michael Savage, then a talk show host on her network
prior to being removed for telling a caller he hoped the person would contract
HIV, called her a ‘slut’, a ‘porn star’, and an ‘accessory to the murder of Jewish
children’ on-air. NBC executives rewarded this conduct by naming him their
‘showman’ (quoted in Lieberman 2003). Banfield told a Kansas State University
audience during the Iraq invasion that

horrors were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism?...I was
ostracized just for going on television and saying, ‘Here’s what the leaders of
Hezbollah, a radical Moslem group, are telling me about what is needed to
bring peace to Israel’.
(quoted in Schechter 2003a)
She was immediately demoted and disciplined by NBC for criticizing journalistic
standards. Erik Sorenson, President of MSNBC, chortled that ‘one can be
unabashedly patriotic and be a good journalist at the same time’ (quoted in Allan
and Zelizer 2004: 7). No wonder Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr
Mahathir Mohamad accused the US of hypocrisy in its calls for a separation of
media and state – ‘[w]hen it suits them, there is no freedom of the Press’. Similar
critiques came from official Iranian sources, and the Turkish Daily News, when
pointing to the slow, begrudging reactions of the US media and political classes
to revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison (Aktan 2004; BBC Monitoring
International Reports 2004b; New Straits Times 2003b).
When it was decided to co-opt journalists for the Iraq invasion by ‘embedding’
them with the military, reporters were required to sign a contract agreeing with
Pentagon instructions on coverage, including no off-the-record interviews, which
had been crucial in Vietnam. Magazine writer Michael Wolff questioned this
practice, so Fox accused him of being unpatriotic, while talk radio’s resident