Page 27 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

16 Toby Miller
restrictions on reporting. Interpretation displaced knowledge. Fox News Roger
Ailes, who doubled as an adviser to Bush minor on foreign policy, describes
Fox’s new method of covering global stories in this helpful way: ‘We basically
sent hit teams overseas from out of here’. Leslie Moonves of CBS explained
that entertainment dominated news: ‘As you get further away from September 11,
that will revert back to normal’ (quoted in New Yorker 2001). And sure enough,
the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2002) revealed that TV news coverage
of national and international issues fell by 33 per cent from October 2001
to March 2002, as celebrity and lifestyle issues took over from discussion of
the various parts of the world that the US directly and indirectly rules and
controls.
Emad Adeeb, the Chair of Al Alam Al Youm and host of On the Air! in Egypt,
summed up US foreign-correspondent techniques like this

you come and visit us in what I call the American Express Tour – 72
hours. ...you stay at the same hotel where the 150,000 colleagues before you
have stayed. You eat at the same restaurant because you’ve been given its
name. You have the same short list of people who have been inter-
viewed...you buy the same presents for your wives or girlfriends or mis-
tresses, because you have the same address from your friends before you. You
don’t do anything out of the norm, and you come writing the same story with
the same slogan – a minute-and-a-half bite, or a 500-word story – and you
think that you know the Middle East. ...and then when a crisis happens, you
are interviewed as an expert.
(quoted in Pew Fellowships in International Journalism 2002)

Pakistan’s Friday Times offered this guide on how to ‘look like a CNN
correspondent’:

10. Pretend to be in grave danger while reporting from the roof of the
Marriott, Islamabad.
9. Never learn how to pronounce ‘Pakistan’.
8. Get a U. S. marine escort to help you do your groceries.
7. Bond with the locals by hanging out at Muddy’s Café.
6. Carry big black cameras with CNN stickers pasted all over them.
5. Always wear a safari jacket (esp. when in big cities).
4. Wear a CNN t-shirt.
3. Wear a CNN hat.
2. Wear CNN underwear.
1. Hunt for the biggest lunatics to put on air.
(quoted in Schechter and Dichter 2003: 49)

In editor Fuad Nahdi’s (2003) words, dumping ‘young, inexperienced and
excitable’ journalists in the Middle East who are functionally illiterate and his-
torically ignorant means that the US media depends on ‘clippings and weekend