Page 24 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

US journalism 13
information was not available through domestic media outlets. The Australian
and European media referred to the question of cluster bombs ten times as often
as their US counterparts (FAIR 2003g; Rampton and Strauber 2003: 197, 194).
Even wounded US soldiers were left unnoticed by the mainstream media, with no
bedside interviews from hospitals. Journalists ran from the accusation of
being unpatriotic. Fallen men and women had become the ‘disappeared’
(Berkowitz 2003). Friday prayers in Tehran produced a telling critique from
Hashemi-Rafsanjani:

The American newspapers are banned from printing the pictures of those
killed or injured in Iraq. Aren’t you really surprised? Those who exert pres-
sure on countries like ours, as they claim, for the sake of freedom, do not
allow their own newspapers, TVs, including private TV, to print or show these
photos or films.
(BBC Monitoring International Reports 2004b)

The point that much – though not all – of this censorship was self-inflicted is only
partially irrelevant, so unitary were the politics and policies of the US state and
media in their self-righteous denunciations.
The invasion of Afghanistan marked one of Bush minor’s infrequent press
conferences. On 10 November 2001, he sat alongside Pakistan’s military coup
leader, Pervez Musharraf, and described how the war on terrorism in Afghanistan
would unfurl in concert with ‘our friends’, the Northern Alliance. In response to
another question, Musharraf referred to the Alliance’s record of ‘atrocities’, and the
need to prevent it from getting near Kabul. One journalist queried Bush about the
contradiction between his account of ‘our friends’ and Musharraf’s account of
their ‘atrocities’. Bush refused to answer the question, on the grounds that the
reporter had already posed one query. Unlike any other democracy, no journalist
in the room picked up the question. And when Helen Thomas asked Fleischer
during the 2003 invasion of Iraq about the propriety of televising Taliban
prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, given the complaints made by the US about
similar shots of US prisoners of war, she was dispatched to the back of the
room for the remainder of the conflict and given no opportunity to ask questions –
typical from this Administration (Hans 2001; Mokhiber and Weissman 2003a;
Robbins 2003).
Meanwhile, Guantánamo prisoners remained uncharged years after their cap-
ture during the defeat of the Taliban, and without legal or media access other than
via the demeaning film of them in cages, until the US Supreme Court finally
queried this in mid-2004. The government argued that they were not entitled to
legal counsel because they were not subject to the Geneva Convention; and
that they could not be interviewed because they were subject to the Convention.
The media elsewhere are appalled by this infraction of basic human rights. In
the US, it was left up to JAG, a CBS drama written by ex-military officers, to
address and sanitize the issue (Burston 2003: 168; Center for Constitutional