"Those guilty of Tuesday's attack should pay. But hunting monsters is risky business. The danger isn't that the monster will catch you, but that you won't know when you have become one yourself." - Robert Kirby, columnist, 9/16/01
The 9/11 attack, responsible for devastating the Twin Towers and the World Trade Center in New York, also claimed another casualty - American journalism, trapping it in a conflict between its duty to inform the public and its desire to be popular by promoting patriotism.
This conflict did not go unnoticed but it was largely un-discussed in the media, which to this day 9 years and tens of thousands of casualties later, has only changed in one way - with less coverage on a daily basis.
Then CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, talked about it in 2002 but not on his network in America. Appearing on BBC's Night talk across the ocean in London, he said: "Limiting access, limiting information to cover the backsides of those who are in charge of the war, is extremely dangerous and cannot and should not be accepted."
"And I am sorry to say that, up to and including the moment of this interview, overwhelmingly it has been accepted by the American people. And the current administration revels in that, they relish that, and they take refuge in that."
Within a few years, after a questionable incident blown out of all proportion, Rather was dropped by the CBS. Few other insider voices then followed his example - perhaps for obvious reasons.
I was in New York that fateful Tuesday, and watched the coverage with increasing alarm - an alarm that has not abated over all these years. Being a news analyst known as the News Dissector, I began watching religiously, armed only with a remote control. I scrolled the channels only to find sameness of pro-government orientation with critics banned from the airwaves.
In America, it was like that in the early days of the Vietnam conflict, and later, in much of the coverage of the Gulf war. And now, once again, with some distinct differences, in Afghanistan and other fronts in the still expanding 'war' against terrorism. The difference today, despite all the new technologies, hundreds of news channels and diverse views instantaneously available through the Internet, is nothing but an even graver situation on the information front.
We have more media and less understanding. Yes, I know how imprecise the term 'media' has become since we are all exposed to information of all kinds, online and offline, analog and digital, broadband and satellite, in the traditional press and conventional television newscasts as well as in a proliferating array of magazines, web sites, zines, videos and films. What is called news pours into us, and through us mediated through more technologies and 'platforms' that I can keep up with. And, yet, at a time of deepening crisis, when responsible media is needed more than ever, so much of it is failing us all the same.
There were even times in this time of terror that the media seemed to terrorizing us more than enlightening us. News about terror often became distancing and frightening with alarmist reporting of an often unsubstantiated, if not, misleading kind, leading to a panicked response with millions of Americans ready to sacrifice their basic freedoms for security. In many instances, the first stories, and 'breaking news' bulletins forecasting new attacks proved wrong, based on skimpy evidence or no evidence at all.
Millions of people ended up relying on such reports, often believing they were being well served. Far too many viewers then believed they were 'in the loop,' in the know, and getting the 'real' story. (Ironically, much of the entertainment programming on the air is now called 'reality television') so distinctions between 'faction' and fiction are often elusive.
After all, TV News looks so authoritative and comprehensive. It is packaged to be perceived as 'credible' and then delivered with well honed and tested techniques designed to be believable.
Cumulatively, this image-driven approach often supplants information. Today's picture driven mediums conceal as much as they reveals. The problem is worse than ever, because all but a few journalists have effectively been barred from battlefields stretched from the East of Afghanistan to the West Bank of Palestine.
Increasingly, government sources set the agenda and help frame the issues and the news. Access to documents and details are limited by policy and practice until recently when documents unearthed by WikiLeaks showed the vast gap between what politicians are telling us and each other.
News coverage of this conflict is worse than ever also because many media institutions have confused jingoism with journalism. Truth telling tends to be degraded when American flags start flying in the lapels of newscasters and in the graphics surrounding news sets. In that environment, voices of dissent quickly disappear like some dissident priest in Argentina during the days of that country's 'dirty war'. It took The New York Times almost two months to discover and report that news management techniques were orchestrating what TV news casts were covering, and that the TV reporting and pundit shows were leaving out dissident voices once the war was up and running.
Ironically or not, in a war against the Taliban condemned for its treatment of women, most of the pundits on American TV remained men, according to The Washington Post. Only 12 female experts interviewed against 78 males on the weekend shows in the month after September 11th, the Post found. The writer mocked this clear pattern of bias by repeating, "men, men, men" as if we needed a reminder of the macho ethic that takes over when media discussions on the use of military power get underway.
We live in an age of media politics, governed not just by politicians but by what is in an effect a 'mediaocracy' - a mutually dependent relationship between media and politics - a nexus of power in which political leaders use media exposure to shape opinions and drive policy.
Political candidates increasingly rely on their media advisors and spend small fortunes to buy air time to get their poll tested messages across. Governments don't have to buy time but their media operations have even bigger budgets to hire small armies of strategists and speechwriters. This mediaocracy then sets the agenda and frames what issues get the focus, and which do not.
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