Page 22 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

US journalism 11
don’t want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days
we’re going to own that country’(quoted in EXTRA!Update 2004: 2). That shocking
remark revealed more than he meant.
Of course, ‘infrastructure’ was inanimate. People could move and bleed and
die – but they were not worth owning in quite the same way. Not surprisingly, the
US networks’ censorship of footage of Afghan civilian casualties in October 2001
was almost total (Hudson et al. 2002). Military manoeuvres took second place to
civilian suffering in the rest of the world’s media coverage of the Afghan and Iraqi
crises, invasions and occupations (della Carva 2003). Al Jazeera dedicated only a
third of its stories to war footage. Unlike CNN, it emphasized human distress
rather than electronic effectiveness, vernacular reportage rather than patriotic
euphemism (Jasperson and El-Kikhia 2003: 119, 126–127). The thousands of
civilian Afghan deaths reported by south Asian, Southeast Asian, western
European, and Middle Eastern news services went essentially unrecorded here,
because they could not be ‘verified’ by US journalists or officials (Herold 2001).
Several US newspapers instructed journalists to minimize coverage of Afghan
civilian casualties during the invasion (Flanders 2001). Fox News Managing
Editor Brit Hulme said that civilian casualties may not belong on television, as
they are ‘historically, by definition, a part of war’. CNN instructed presenters to
mention September 11 each time Afghan suffering was mentioned, and Walter
Isaacson, the network’s President, worried aloud that it was ‘perverse to focus
too much on the casualties or hardship’ (quoted in Kellner 2003: 107, 66). This
perversity only applied to domestic CNN viewers – those in the real world were
judged sturdy enough to learn about the real world (Williams 2003: 177).
The silence was a reminder of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s callous remark
from 1991, when he was a military planner of the Iraq war. When asked if he
knew how many Iraqis had died as a result of that conflict, he replied ‘[i]t’s really
not a number I’m terribly interested in’ (quoted in Zinn 2003: x). Driven by the
same attitude, in the fortnight prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, none of the major
three networks provided any examination of the humanitarian impact of such an
action. Human Rights Watch’s briefing paper, and a UN Undersecretary-General’s
warning on the topic, lay uncovered (FAIR 2003a).
To hide and deny the carnage of its 2001 invasion, Bush’s Pentagon bought
exclusive rights to satellite photos of Afghanistan, shutting off scrutiny of its
attacks (Solomon 2001; Magder 2003: 38). Another kind of scrutiny took its place –
a carnival of exaltation over matériel. Thirty-eight per cent of CNN’s coverage of
the bombardment centred on technology, while 62 per cent focused on military
activity without history or politics, as a matter of technical specifications, of
instrumental rationality (Jasperson and El-Kikhia 2003: 119, 126–127).
Desperate Afghan refugees in camps were filmed by the BBC, which then sold
the footage on to ABC. But the soundtrack to the two broadcast versions gave
them incompatible meanings:

British media presented the camps as consisting of refugees from U. S. bombing
who said that fear of the daily bombing attacks had driven them out of the city,