Page 21 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

10 Toby Miller
how many reporters I’ve said, “Where do you get this stuff?” And they say, “Well,
it was in a State Department press release”, as if that’s an acceptable source’
(Bosse and Palast 2003). Elsewhere, ‘[i]t’s not the job of a journalist to snap to
the attention of generals’ (Fisk in Fisk et al. 2003), but that appears to be a
qualification in the US.
The golden triangle focuses the US media on the state, as embodied by the
party in power. A study conducted at the beginning of 2002 disclosed that CNN
had covered 157 events featuring Bush operatives and just 7 that centred on
Democrat politicians (Alterman 2003: 206). In the fortnight running up to the
2003 invasion, the major networks and PBS dedicated less than 1 per cent of
related airtime to opponents of the war. During the war, a sample of National
Public Radio’s guest list on all topics over one month shows that 64 per cent were
officials or corporate spokespeople (Rendall and Butterworth 2004). In justifying
this state of affairs, CNN anchor Aaron Brown complained that ‘there was no
center to cover’in opposition to the Administration, because the Democratic Party
had not opposed invasion (Goodman et al. 2003), while Fox News accompanied
anti-war protests in Manhattan with a ticker news crawl taunting the demonstra-
tors (Folkenflik 2003). When its own programme, The Simpsons, mocked this via
a ticker that read ‘Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com’, the net-
work immediately threatened the creator with legal action (Byrne 2003b). Bush
minor dismissed the anti-war movement as ‘focus groups’ (quoted in Grieve
2003) and Republican Party mavens referred to these ‘few protestors in the
streets’ as akin to ‘mob rule’ (Boot in Goodman et al. 2003). All this even as
Viacom, CNN, Fox, and Comedy Central were refusing to feature paid billboards
and commercials against the invasion (Hastings 2003), and UN activities in
the region, including weapons inspections, became the least-covered items on
network news (Huff 2003).
Since 2001, there have of course been some changes, as this nationalism has
developed a texture derived from the specific conjuncture of terrorism as an
external threat, experienced at home, that countenances invasions elsewhere. The
US media and war planners have supplied narrow frameworks for interpretation
of terrorism into a starting point for escalating global violence. Consider the
immediate obedience of TV news executives after Condoleeza Rice, the National
Security Adviser, asked them to cease playing tapes of Osama bin Laden speak-
ing, purportedly lest he pass on coded instructions to followers; Bush minor’s
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had already said people should ‘watch what they
say’ about terrorism and US foreign policy (quoted in Navasky 2002: xv–xvi),
although this was excised from White House transcripts (Magder 2003: 36).
Media martinet Rupert Murdoch promised ‘We’ll do whatever is our patriotic
duty’, later intoning that removing Saddam Hussein would reduce the price of oil:
‘The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy’ (quoted in
Solomon 2001 and Greenslade 2003). Each of the 175 newspapers he owned
across the world endorsed the invasion (Harvey 2003: 12). But this went further than
the Oedipalised son of a renowned embedded journalist from the Somme. NBC’s
Tom Brokaw said on air during the initial invasion ‘One of the things that we