Page 283 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Afghanistan and 9/11 273

Arab media outlets like A1 Jazeera, which referred to the campaign as a "so-
called War on Terror" rather than a clear-cut campaign to fight terrorism.
In the tradition of promoting clean war claims, the Wall Street Journal
sought to prepare Americans for a "long campaign" in which "The U.S. wants to
avoid civilian casualties [and prevent] adding to the misery of the Afghan peo-
ple."lo' The Washington Post reported that the U.S. "unleashed fresh air strikes
at military and terrorist targets"102 rather than on civilians. The emphasis then,
was on "aerial assaults on resources of the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama
bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taliban leadership."103 Such reporting seemed to
imply that civilians were not dying in large numbers in those attacks, although
newspapers did acknowledge at times that civilian deaths resulted from Ameri-
can bombings.
The "clean war" myth promulgated by the American media differed greatly
from reports in Progressive-Left media outlets and parts of the British media.
The Guardian of London, for example, drew attention to human rights reports
and national and international media sources collected by Marc Herold of the
University of New Hampshire, which estimated that as many as 3,500 civilians
were killed during the attacks, more than the number of Americans who died on
911 1.Io4 In general, Marc Herold's study was the focus of much more attention in
the independent American press than it was in the mainstream. In an article enti-
tled "Tragic E m in U.S. Military Policy" run in Z Magazine, Edward Herman
asserted: "the idea that most of these civilians were killed by 'errant' bombs or
targeting errors is the central and most important establishment lie-they were
killed in accord with a deliberate policy of sending missiles to, and dropping
bombs on, targets in populated areas based on reports of a Taliban or al Qaeda
presence."'05 Large-scale civilian deaths, in the end, were inevitable when one
understands that Taliban headquarters and facilities were located either within or
close to many villages.106
This chapter set out to discuss the imbalance in media reporting over the
conflict in Afghanistan. There was a heavy skew in mainstream reporting and
editorializing in favor of the official claims that the U.S. was limiting civilian
casualties, assisting in rebuilding Afghanistan, and targeting terrorists in their
campaign. Nonviolent solutions to the 9/11 attacks, such as extradition, were
largely ignored, despite American public opinion, which was overwhelmingly in
favor of hearing and discussing non-violent alternatives. Taking into account
this public inclination, one can easily conclude, as many already have, that me-
dia reporting and editorializing should have focused much more on providing a
wide range of possible reactions, violent and non-violent, in the wake of the
911 1 attacks.