Page 33 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

22 Toby Miller
The way the US state and media comport themselves has an inevitable impact on
the rest of the world. A study by the International Federation of Journalists in
October 2001 found blanket global coverage of the September 11 attacks, with
very favourable discussion of the US and its travails – even in nations that had
suffered terribly from US aggression. But with attitudes like Malkovich’s, is it any
surprise the giant advertising firm McCann-Erickson’s evaluation of 37 states saw
a huge increase in cynicism about the US media’s manipulation of the events and
the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press’ (2002) study of 42 countries
in 2002 found a dramatic fall from favour for the US since that time? Or that
Pew’s 2003 follow-up (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press 2003b)
encountered even lower opinions of the US nation, population, and policies
worldwide than the year before, with specifically diminished support for anti-
terrorism, and faith in the UN essentially demolished by US unilateralism and
distrust of Bush minor? Public diplomacy becomes a thin reed.
‘Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003?’, asked Time
magazine of 250,000 people across Europe, offering them a choice between Iraq,
North Korea, and the US. Eight per cent selected Iraq, 9 per cent chose North
Korea, and...but you have already done the calculation about the most feared
country of all (Pilger 2003). A BBC poll in eleven countries in mid-2003 confirmed
this. It found sizeable majorities everywhere disapproving of Bush minor and the
invasion of Iraq, especially over civilian casualties (BBC News Online 2003). When
Dick Cheney immediately and repeatedly spoke of the need for war against ‘40 or
50 countries’after September 11, it was only right to feel anxious (quoted in Ahmad
2003: 16). This was a shift, in the words of the philosopher Leopoldo Zea (2001),
from ‘la Guerra fría a la sucia’ (from the Cold War to the Dirty War). Two years
later, after Cheney encouraged the unsubstantiated belief among the US public that
Iraq was behind the World Trade Center’s destruction, even Bush minor felt obliged
to correct this lie immediately. There was no attempt by the mainstream media to
publicize this to the 70 per cent of the population that had believed the original
canard – Bush’s admission was not deemed newsworthy. Of the country’s twelve
largest-circulation daily papers, only the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune,
and the Dallas Morning News mentioned it on their front pages. The New York
Times ran it on page 22, USA Today on page 16, the Houston Chronicle on page 3,
the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News on page 14, the
Washington Post on page 18, and Newsday on page 41. Republican-Party house
organs the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal did not mention the revelation
at all (Porges 2003). No wonder that the empirically-challenged US population held
firm to the fantasy that the invasion of Iraq had demonstrated to the world that the
US was ‘trustworthy and supportive of democracy’ (Pew Research Center for the
People & the Press 2004b: 2). With the bellicose tone of Bush minor’s second
inauguration ringing across the world, the South China Morning Post was just one
of many sources querying the absence of any critical interrogation by the US media
of the government’s apparent next obsession, Iranian nuclearity (Dyer 2005). This
lack of insight is a direct result of the policies and proclivities of the US state and
media – peas in a pod, harvested by ideologues and corporations. In the service of
the nation, mainstream journalism has become a baying scourge of the truth.