Getting
a Grip (Anniversary Edition)
Up
From the Rubble:
Salvaging Journalism in Post 9-11
America
by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice 10/17/02
Now that the rubble of the World Trade Center has been
cleared, and the Pentagon has been mostly rebuilt, we need to start dealing with
the cultural rubble from last year’s terrorist attack.
Most disturbing was the destruction of the free press that occurred
concurrently with the terror attacks. By nightfall on September 11th,
2002, the mainstream national media
spoke with one voice and there was no dissent.
According to Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation, mainstream
American journalists adopted a uniform set of ideological assumptions:
It was time to rally around the flag; Those who questioned Bush
Administration policies were giving “aid to the enemy”; Any attempt to link
the events of 9-11 to the United States’ previous role in the Middle East or
elsewhere did not deserve serious coverage; And previous media demonization of
the Muslim world was now vindicated.
News Anchors
Wrapped in the Flag
After 9-11, newscasters around the country literally
wrapped themselves in the American flag – with one jingoistic morning anchor
on Buffalo’s ABC affiliate draping herself in an odd star-spangled red, white
and blue cape, as if it were some bizarre sort of prayer shawl or American Burqa.
Fox News anchors all quickly adopted red, white and blue lapel ribbons as
official on-air dress. CNN draped
their logo in old glory. Newspapers
across the country took advantage of their color printing capacity and saturated
their papers with flags. TV
stations across the country developed “America Under Attack” logos and ran
them liberally during their newscasts and teasers.
Deep voiced radio announcers droned on at the start of their newscasts
with quick lines such as, “From the Front Lines of America’s War Against
Terror.” Despite the lack of a
subsequent attack, the universal message was, “Be Scared!”
In this mediated world of impending and unthinkable attacks, the only
solace to be found was in the halting rhetoric of our leader’s voice, which
radio stations such as Buffalo’s trash-talk outlet, WBEN-AM, often put to
music.
In this environment, the media rescued the failed
presidency of George W. Bush and ceremoniously brought it to life.
The naked emperor was suddenly a strong leader.
He was smart, calm and well poised to take command of the nation in its
time of trouble. Bush’s lexicon
became the nation’s lexicon, as the media adopted his “charismatic”
rhetoric. During the period immediately following 9-11, journalists
tripped over themselves to line up behind Bush, with CBS News’ Dan Rather, the
nation’s most visible journalist, proclaiming, “George Bush is the
president. He makes the decisions.
And, you know, as just one American, [if] he wants me to line up, just
tell me where” (Miller 2002, Bass 2001).
Responsible journalism in America was on its deathbed.
There were no critical voices in the mainstream media.
Absent was any debate, as the nation went off to war in Afghanistan, and
as the House of Representatives passed draconian legislation rolling human and
civil rights back fifty years. Barbara
Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, speaking
to a reporter for The Columbia Journalism Review, said there was “a
frightening suppression of the news” after 9-11.
Following 9-11, a host of related stories were suddenly off
limits – reporting them became unpatriotic. The CIA’s role in supporting and
training the fundamentalist Mujahideem terrorists during the cold war, U.S. oil
companies attempts to court the Taliban and run pipelines through Afghanistan,
the previous Bush administration’s support of Osama bin Laden, and dozens of
other pertinent stories went unreported in the U.S. media, despite grabbing
headlines around the world. An
artifical information gap, separating Americans from their global neighbors was
beginning to emerge, nurtured by a self-censored national press corps.
The Truth
Behind the Third Tower Collapse
In a culture of hawkish hyper-patriotism, all of the heroes
of 9-11 became off limits for criticism. Rudolf
Guiliani, for example, who in the course of one day rose from jilted husband and
despotic mayor, to national hero, was actually responsible, along with the
terrorists, for the collapse of the third World Trade Center building, a 47
story tower known as #7 World Trade Center.
Number-seven, it turns out, housed Guiliani’s personal emergency
command bunker, which was complete with 42,000 gallons of diesel fuel, illegally
stored above ground to run the mayor’s emergency generators.
The fuel caught fire after the collapse of the towers, and caused a
structural member of the building to melt, just as the jet fuel did in the
larger towers. This story, though
circulating in the alternative press, was not reported by the mainstream media
for nearly four months. When if
finally broke, it was downplayed.
Reporters who wanted to write stories that went beyond the
official government line found their efforts stifled by an administration
obsessed with secrecy and disinformation. Government
press conferences are now often choreographed, with officials providing little
if any information to reporters. We now have secret military tribunals and nameless prisoners,
sometimes held at military bases on foreign soil, inaccessible to the press.
Facets of everyday journalism were criminalized in the
aftermath of the attacks of September 11th.
In New York, Mayor Guiliani ordered the area around the World Trade
Center closed. According to the
Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, several journalists were
arrested on trespassing charges. Two weeks later the Guilliani administration issued a ban on
amateur photography near the ruins, installing signs warning that photographers
risked arrest. In Pennsylvania,
journalists investigating the mysterious dual debris fields where the wreckage
of the fourth hijacked plane fell, were also held by police on trespass charges.
Information gathering became difficult at best, and at worst,
criminalized.
Telling The
Truth About Lying
After establishing the reality that they were not going to
provide much information to the press, the Bush administration then announced
that they were going to freely provide disinformation, via a CIA/Pentagon
controlled “Office of Strategic Influence.”
The new agency, based on the Contra-War model of the Office of Public
Diplomacy, had a stated purpose of planting lies in the world’s media, in an
effort to make U.S. war moves palatable. Telling
the truth about lying, however, is still a faux pas.
The Bush administration officially cancelled the project, but the cat was
out of the bag about their policy of lying to the press – yet a compliant
press corps never cried foul.
In a related event, a story that’s been kicking around
the alternative press for about a decade, suddenly made national news as West
Virginia’s aging senior senator, Robert Byrd, exposed the previous Bush
administration’s transfer of biological weapons material to Saddam Hussein’s
government in the 1980s during their war with Iran. Bush’s secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in another
public lie, categorically denied the charge, but the renegade Byrd produced a
paper trail of government documents. In
the wake of the scandal, the American Gulf War Veterans Association demanded
that Rumsfeld resign.
Lying is now standard practice for the Bush administration,
but journalists are loath to challenge the official lies or admit that
administration sources are not credible, and hence, can’t be relied upon as
accurate sources of information. With
an environment dominated by a combination of no information, and disinformation,
it’s impossible for journalists to do their jobs, even if they wanted to.
The few mainstream journalists who tried to cover the
Afghanistan war found access to U.S. soldiers, the battlefield, and civilian
areas in Afghanistan to be severely restricted. The handful of journalists
allowed to report from in-country were confined by military authorities in an
airplane hanger to prevent them from photographing or interviewing injured
soldiers. Afghan forces under U.S.
command confiscated film from American journalists covering the war.
With news crews denied access to the war zones, they had to rely on
footage supplied to them by Pentagon public relations officials.
These government produced Video News Releases, complete with interviews
of gung-ho troops, appeared transparently as news reports on American TV
stations. Rather than protest their
inability to report the news, American news organizations simply allowed the
government to supplant the news with propaganda footage, legitimated as news by
the acquiescence of a compliant press corps.
The public never knew the difference.
Bruckheimer’s
War
More recently, according to John Macarthur, author of
“Second front, censorship and propaganda in the Gulf War,” the
military gifted Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with comprehensive access
to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Bruckheimer, who produced films supporting the military, such
as “Pearl Harbor,” and “Blackhawk down,” which was subsidized by the
U.S. military through “in-kind” assistance, is now shooting a so-called
“reality series” for ABC which will feature U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The London Guardian has dubbed this blatant propaganda as “militainment.”
ABC’s own news reporters, by contrast, do not have similar access to
troops.
For reasons of self censorship, and acquiescence to
government attempts to control information, the mainstream press has failed to
live up to its responsibility to educate and inform Americans about current
events – an especially important duty for a nation that now perpetually stand
on the cusp of war. Information
starved American citizens, for their part, are craving information about global
events. According to a
comprehensive study commissioned by the Pew International Journalism Program,
which surveyed editors at 65% of all American newspapers with daily circulations
in excess of 30,000 copies, 95% of those editors surveyed said reader interest
in international news increased following 9-11.
More
“Terror” News
According to the Pew study, 78% of the editors reported
that they increased their foreign news hole.
Of those who reported increasing their foreign news, 88% said that
“all” or “most” of the increased space was taken up by stories relating
to “the anti-terrorism effort.” Of
course “terrorism” is an ill-defined word.
British journalist Robert Fisk defines terrorists as “those who are
using violence against the side that is using the word.”
Hence, mainstream media reporting on terrorism fails to see state
sanctioned violence by client states such as Israel and Pakistan, as terrorism.
Nor does it see the institutionalized poverty that is structurally
maintained within the hegemonic global economic order, which kills millions of
people each year, as terrorism. And
of course the very terror of the anti-terror campaigns, ranging from bombs
dropping on civilian areas to the arming of repressive states, is not reported
as terrorism. Hence, the terrorist
backlash, born out of desperation, and fueled by a cycle of hatred that is
nurtured by so-called anti-terror campaigns, is incomprehensible to an
information-starved public.
Americans, horrified by the images of 9-11, and baffled by
the reality that there are people in the world who hate us so, that they would
sacrifice their own lives in order to kill a faceless cross-section of the U.S.
population, have begun to ask, “Why do they hate us?” The official answers, from people like Dan Rather, who
explained that the terrorists targeted us, “because they’re evil, and
because they’re jealous of us,” just didn’t cut it.
The Bush administration line, explaining that they hate us because we
stand for freedom, democracy and other similar values, which in fact we don’t
really stand for, reeked of shallow rhetoric.
The question still lingered, but none of the answers offered by the
mainstream media seemed to make much sense.
Hence, when confronted with the demand for more international news, the
media responded with more Bush administration propaganda.
Put simply, the media failed to respond to the market.
In the days following 9-11, as the media shamelessly became cheerleaders
for the Bush administration’s moves toward war, the demand for accurate
balanced information kept increasing. A
noticeable gap appeared between the available information, and the public’s
demand for information. Widely
available Internet technology allowed alternative media activists to
immediately, and inexpensively, address this market imbalance.
The New Media
Evolution
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project,
Americans immediately turned to the Internet to search for news after the
attacks of 9-11. Their numbers
overwhelmed existing internet news sites. At the same time, “do it yourself”
journalists instantly created a plethora of alternative sites.
At first, the new web sites responded to increased web traffic on 9-11,
offering eyewitness accounts and photographic images of the disasters in New
York, Washington and Pennsylvania. In short time, their content grew in response
to the censorship of the mainstream media as well.
The new sites provided political analysis of events related to 9-11 that
represented a wide array of perspectives and interpretations, news about
responses to the attacks from around the world, links to previously published
stories giving context to the attacks, and investigative reports on subjects
such as Bush family connections to the bin Ladens and U.S. support for
fundamentalist terrorists. Whereas
the mainstream media focused on the events of 9-11 simply in tactical terms,
reporting about immediate reactions and security moves, the web journalists
provided a political, economic, cultural and societal analysis of the events.
The failure of mainstream journalism is tied to the fact
that journalism education often fails to prepare journalists to understand the
world around them. They may know
how to write, but they often don’t have a clue as to what they are writing so
eloquently about. Hence, they
develop a reliance on official sources who spoon feed stories to them –
complete with an official spin. For
these journalists, the terror attacks were simply the result of a weak security
state – expanding police powers would insure a safer America. The web
journalists were able to move beyond this Neanderthal analysis.
And evidence shows that the successful ones were also were able to write
eloquently. Mainstream journalists
are also reined in by the economic interests of their corporate owners and
corporate sponsors – masters that independent journalists don’t have to
answer to.
With the development of “personal journalism, guerilla
journalism” and “citizen-produced journalism.” the Internet came of age in
the wake of 9-11. New news sites
that emerged in response to the new demand for alternative information after
9-11, such as New York City journalist and author, Bill Weinberg’s excellent
World War 3 Report (worldwar3report.com), continue to thrive and grow today.
Alternative radio programs such as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, and
long established publications such as The Nation and In These Times,
also thrived as they challenged the dominant information paradigm. In short, the
collapse of credibility suffered by the mainstream media in the wake of the 9-11
attacks fueled a renewed growth in the alternative media – a growth that is
forcing the mainstream media to cover previously unreported stories.
By forcing the mainstream media to cover such stories, the alternative
media is providing a service that stretches well beyond its own relatively small
audience.
Getting a Grip
Last September 11th I was content to concentrate
solely on my research and teaching. After a previous stint at a local paper
whose publishers declared any negative mention of the auto industry, SUVs or The
Buffalo News, off limits, I took a break from journalism. In the wake of
September 11th, however, I couldn’t contain myself.
I started writing a piece, which grew into a 4,300 word treatise.
I pitched it to a few venues around the country who regularly published
my work, but none of whom would run it in its bloated state.
Still, it was tight writing. There
was nothing to cut. The story
needed context and nobody in the media was providing it.
Frustrated, I emailed it to a few friends, so at least somebody would
read it. As it happens, they
emailed it to a few friends, and so on. Within
days, professors in the U.S. and Europe were emailing me to ask for reprint
permission. I was invited to speak
at a forum on terrorism. The
Internet had given my story a life of its own – one devoid of editorial
control. Ideas now traveled on
their own merit.
The positive reception for my piece inspired me to start
writing again, and after a meeting with folks here at ArtVoice, I began
writing the Getting a Grip column, mostly in response to the new
censorship practiced by the mainstream media. During the last year, this column
has been published every week. I’ve
reported on many of the national and global stories ignored or outright censored
by our city’s monopoly daily. ArtVoice’s
readers know the connections between the Bush family and the bin Ladens.
They know of Dick Cheney’s role at Halliburton Energy, and that
company’s role in Central Asia. They
know all the details about the 2000 coup in Florida.
They know our local government is a kleptocracy. They know their SUVs run
on blood and our hedonistic consumerism causes ecocide and fuels a sweatshop
economy. I’ve now written 52 such
columns, averaging 1,800 words each. This
column is my anniversary rant.
Early on, I expected this would be a short-term gig.
I set up a special email account for hatemail.
But it immediately filled with fan mail.
Many of my columns have gone into international syndication.
I’ve been interviewed on radio stations across the U.S. and have been
invited to speak at various churches and educational institutions.
I was surprised to find out that this stuff is indeed popular.
In the end, I guess I was naive to think that a column, which was
critical of our unelected authoritarian government, would be unpopular.
I suppose that I too had bought into the official post 9-11 rhetoric.
The Death
Industries
Though my columns are sandwiched between cigarette and auto
ads, I’ve never been censored. And
I don’t expect to be censored. The
column drives readership numbers. Unbridled journalism does have a market niche.
Reporters at The Buffalo News privately refer to my column as “edgy.”
Yet, offended advertisers from the death industries (SUVs, cigarettes, malt
liquor etc.) aren’t talking about boycotting this paper.
It’s a winning product, and they need it if they are going to reach
active consumers – even if an occasional article exposes them for the
parasites they are. This is what ArtVoice
has to offer the capitalist marketplace – an edgy product.
And publishers of a handful of independent weeklies understand that this
so called “edge” is their trademark. If
these papers drop their few edgy articles and columns, then there will be
nothing to distinguish them from their better-funded daily rivals, and they will
die. If this happens, there are always smaller and possibly edgier alternative
newspapers ready to take over the franchise.
On September 13th of 2001, it looked as if American journalism was down for the count. For the mainstream press, this is still true. But it was the ultimate destruction of the mainstream press, mostly at its own hand, that paved the way for a new press movement. And it’s proving popular and unstoppable. At least, that is, until it’s outlawed.
This column, which celebrates the one-year anniversary of “Getting a Grip,” has been adopted from a talk presented by Dr. Niman last week at the 2002 International Conference of The Union for Democratic Communications (www.udc.org).
Copyright 2002. For reprint permission, please contact permission @ mediastudy.com.
