Page 26 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

US journalism 15
proceeded to honour the network with its free-expression prize, and analysis
indicated that the framing devices it used which exercised the Pentagon and other
anti-democrats were identical to media norms everywhere – other than one coun-
try (Byrne 2003a; Fisk 2003b; Khouri 2003; Lobe 2003). The Associated Press
Managing Editors sent an open letter of protest to the Pentagon, noting that
‘journalists have been harassed, have had their lives endangered and have had
digital camera disks, videotape and other equipment confiscated’by the US military
(Associated Press 2003). Meanwhile, the US Government selected Grace Digital
Media to run an Arabic-language satellite television news service into post-invasion
Iraq. Grace is a fundamentalist Christian company that describes itself as ‘dedicated
to transmitting the evidence of God’s presence in the world today’ via ‘secular
news, along with aggressive proclamations that will “change the news” to reflect
the Kingdom of God’. It is dedicated to Zionism (quoted in Mokhiber and
Weissman 2003b).
For their part, the US media derided al Jazeera throughout the war and
occupation. This churlishness reached its nadir in April 2004 when CNN’s Daryn
Kagan interviewed the network’s editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik. What might
have been an opportunity to learn about the horrendous casualties in the Fallujah
uprisings, or to share professional perspectives on methods and angles of
coverage, turned into a bizarrely unreflective indictment of al Jazeera for
bothering to report the deaths of Iraqi non-combatants at the hands of the
invaders. Kagan complained that ‘the story’ was ‘bigger than just the numbers of
people who have been killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the
US military’ (quoted in FAIR 2004). At least this represented interaction with
al Jazeera, a stark contrast with CNN refusing to appear on a Nordic TV panel
with their representatives (Eide 2004: 280). And some analysts suggest that
CNN’s dependence on al Jazeera for direct images and reportage from the
Afghanistan conflict helped to make for a semblance of balance between techno-
cratic celebrations and humanitarian discussions of death (Jasperson and
Al-Kikhia 2003: 120, 125).

The story of overseas news, the role of intellectuals
The US networks know precious little about any other part of the world by
contrast with their western European, Asian, Latin American, and Middle
East counterparts, as evident from several leading journalists’ embarrassed
admissions that US TV coverage of the invasion of Afghanistan was abysmal. In
the absence of experienced crews with relevant knowledge of culture, language,
and history they were shown up (Rosen 2002: 31). The Sydney Morning Herald
called the result ‘[j]ingoistic, sugar-coated, superficial’. CBC’s News Director
found it ‘depressing’. He experienced ‘two different wars’ in Afghanistan, one
available on European television and the other in the US (quoted in Kellner 2003:
111). The Pew Charitable Trusts (2002) reported that opinion rather than the fact
dominated reporting, in part through the inexperience of US journalists noted
earlier, and in part because the Bush Administration imposed unprecedented