Page 20 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

US journalism 9
recreational drug-use specialist Rush Limbaugh publicized his email address,
leading to thousands of messages of hatred (Keeble 2004: 50; Talara 2003;
Thussu and Freedman 2003: 6).
The noted CNN foreign correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, told CNBC after
the 2003 invasion of Iraq

I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled...I’m sorry
to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station
was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And
it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms
of the kind of broadcast work we did.

She was immediately derided by Fox’s Irena Briganti as ‘a spokeswoman for
al Qaeda’ (quoted in Allan and Zelizer 2004: 9 and Zerbisias 2003). Conversely,
her frank assessment drew sighs of relief from the media elsewhere, increasingly
incredulous in the face of their US counterparts’ performance. The New Straits
Times editorialized that this pointed to the need for an alternative global news
network for Muslims (New Straits Times 2003i).
The tendencies listed by Amanpour and exemplified by Briganti were not
merely reactions to September 11. Their causes went deeper. For example, after
the 2000 election, CNN’s Judy Woodruff had told Bush minor’s chief of staff
Andy Card on-air that ‘we look forward to working with you’ (Woodruff quoted
in Solomon 2001). This remark would not be altered by a journalist in most func-
tioning democracies, where official sources are starting-points for work, not
results – and the idea of ‘working with’ a government is seen as ‘Soviet-style’
(Massing 2001). But inside the US, there is a long heritage of reliance on official
sources dating from the evolution of journalistic codes and norms as tools for
monopolistic owners to distract attention from their market domination by focusing
on non-partisan journalism and cloaking themselves in professionalism (Clark
and McChesney 2001; Herman 1999: 83, 87, 158; McChesney 2003). This
quick-fix/idée fixe is a function of both a lengthy history, and more recent
pressures from deregulation and concentration, as well as keen recruiting by the
CIA, which has paid hundreds of US journalists, as approved by their seniors, but
hidden from their readers (Boyd-Barrett 2004: 38–39).
The White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon are referred to as
‘the Golden Triangle’ for reporters (Love 2003: 246). Most US news gathering
produces a feedback loop of staggeringly self-interested proportions. ‘Research’
is based on leaks and leads provided by the Administration, which then quotes the
resulting stories as objective correlatives of its own position. That tendency
reached its awful apogee in the weapons of mass destruction falsehoods perpe-
trated by Bush minor’s apparatchiks and the New York Times in 2003 – falsehoods
of a cosmic magnitude, which drew zero public self criticism for an entire year,
even as the paper was purging staff over invented fact checking on human inter-
est stories (MacArthur 2003). As dissident writer Greg Palast (a dissident in the
US, but a regular in the UK for the BBC and the Guardian) put it, ‘I can’t tell you