Page 28 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

US journalism 17
visits’ of dubious professional integrity. No wonder that CNN’s Jerusalem Bureau
chief, Walter Rodgers, insensitively proclaims that

[f]or a journalist, Israel is the best country in the world to work in...[o]n the
Palestinian side, as is the case in the rest of the Arab world, there is always
that deep divide between Islam and the West.
(quoted in Ibrahim 2003: 96)

CNN, of course, reached its Middle Eastern nadir, and lost viewers to al Jazeera
and others, when one of its ‘reporters’ stated that some nomads would be thun-
derstruck by seeing ‘camels of steel’ (cars) for the first time (MacFarquhar 2003).
Not to mention the notorious exchange between two reporters on air during the
Afghanistan invasion, where one suggested that an assault on an arms depot may
have been part of the civil war and the other offered ‘Oh, are they having one?’
(quoted in Schechter 2003b: 6). Reactionaries celebrate such stories, regarding
them as almost endearing in their status as instant responses to market demand
and the flexible supply of new technologies (Hamilton and Jenner 2004), ignoring
as they must the special responsibility for US citizens to know about the
domination and destruction wrought in their name.
The Tyndall Report (2003) found that network-news coverage from September
2001 to December 2002 of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath basically
ignored all the key topics that should have been relevant to a critical, historicized
consideration of geopolitics at the time: Zionism, Afghanistan after the invasion,
US foreign policy, and US business interests in the Middle East. Lest we imagine
that the print media offer anything better that US television, we should note
that whereas 10 per cent of newspaper coverage in 1983 addressed foreign news,
this had fallen to 2 per cent by 1998. Covers of Time magazine dedicated to inter-
national relations dropped from 11 in 1987 to none a decade later, and that period
saw its foreign reportage diminish from 24 per cent to 12 per cent. These institu-
tions were adopting the ‘just-in-time’ techniques of post-Fordism to current
affairs (Magder 2003: 33). This has led to an intense provincialism. In 1999, when
India, Colombia, and Greece each had far more terrorist incidents than the entire
Middle East combined, the US media dedicated virtually no attention to them
(Love 2003: 247; also see Kern et al. 2003). The New York Times, for example,
was intellectually unprepared to report on terrorism. Because terrorism mostly
occurred outside the US prior to 2001, it was not rated as newsworthy.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reportage of overseas terror took up less than
0.5 per cent of the paper. Of the top 10 subjects covered by the nation’s major
news weeklies in their last issues before the World Trade Center attacks, 9 were
reviews, human interest, or consumer reports (Schechter 2003b: 11). And coverage
by the US media has historically eschewed explanations – both television and
print have focused on othering terrorists through membershipping devices, to the
almost absolute exclusion of discussing social inequality or state-based terror. A
study of articles carried in US News and World Report indicates that in the seven
months after September 11, reasons for the attacks focused entirely on al Qaeda