The Media at War since September 11

Dr Susan Carruthers, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

In my talk I want to discuss what I consider to be the prominent reportorial trends that we have seen since 11 September in the American media. This is going to be a personal perspective on what I think the predominant trends in reporting have been, but also an attempt to fit them into a broader conceptual and somewhat historical context. The underlying questions beneath my discussion are, firstly, to what extent war forms an exceptional case, both in terms of journalistic practice but also in terms of those crucial relationships between journalists and the state, and between media organisations and their publics. Secondly, if war is indeed exceptional, what is particular about a war against terrorism.

Total War
In the UK there has been clearly much discussion of whether this is a war or not. In the United States, on the other hand, the public discourse about the events of September has included very little discussion at all about whether or not this is war. Most Americans take it absolutely as given that the attacks in September mark the start of an all-out war against the United States, or perhaps more grandiosely a war against freedom, against civilisation, against western values, or what have you.

It probably goes without repetition that the events of September were truly staggering to America. America is not accustomed to accepting casualties on its own soil. There were admittedly some earlier terrorist atrocities in the 1990s, but the dominant parallel which we saw drawn in September was of course with the events in Pearl Harbour. They seem to offer perhaps the only viable historical analogue that many Americans could come up with in terms of an attack on American soil. But of course Pearl Harbour is further away from the mainland of the United States, so in many ways the events of September seem to be without an adequate parallel, leaving the total war of World War Two as the nearest available historical analogy. It is perhaps also worth bearing in mind that World War Two has occupied a more prominent cultural position in American life in the last few years than it maybe did in the seventies and eighties, perhaps most notably exemplified by Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. And given the Ben Affleck movie of Pearl Harbour, which although pretty lambasted nevertheless was a big box office draw, an analogy with Pearl Harbour and with total war wasn't going to be lost even on the youngest of Americans. So there has been a lot of talk about total war and World War Two.

Now I want to suggest that this language of war, and in particular the drawing of parallels with World War Two which wasn't just a total war but which in the American popular recollection was also the good war, has powerful political effects. Casting a campaign against terrorism as a total war serves to legitimise all manner of activities which, if peacetime legality and jurisprudence were to prevail, might seem much more questionable. I am sure that in the UK debates about legitimacy, about bombing, about questions of civilian immunity, about how one dealt with prisoners of war, were more prominent. In America there have been really swingeing allegations of civil rights abuses, particularly against non-American citizens, but the idea that you can simply round up alien citizens who might be Middle Eastern, who might be Muslim, on suspicion of their involvement in terrorist activity, without publicising their crimes or trying them in normal courts of law, has not generated much public or media discussion.

My argument about all of this is that the language of war acts in a rather paradoxical kind of a way. It denotes a state which isn't peacetime-the normal rules of peacetime jurisprudence have become irrelevant-yet of course this ignores the fact that war over a number of centuries, if rather fitfully, has evolved certain legalities and conventions. Often these are observed more in the breach but nevertheless from Aquinas onwards there has been a just war tradition attempting to codify the ways in which armed forces might engage with one another, proscribing certain activities, enshrining notions like civilian immunity and designating certain actions in war as war crimes. But when war is mobilised as the sort of paradigm for understanding the campaign against terrorism, clearly what is being invoked is something rather different-a much more commonsense notion about what war entails, along the lines of the well worn motif that all is fair in love and war.

So the war against terrorism is something of a rhetorical device, then, which functions as part of a strategy of legitimisation, a signal that the enemy-in this case, of course, an enemy that is incredibly hard to pin down or to identify-can expect the worst since the gloves of legalistic nicety have been removed.

Now, of course, there is also a very clear signal for media practitioners that they can expect a reframing by the state and the military of the rules of engagement and-as we conventionally see in wartime-a narrowing of the acceptable limits of dissent and a reinterpretation of the principles of objectivity and distance from official sources which conventional journalists in America like to believe that they operate by. The extent to which there really is a decisive break between war and peace is something that we can talk about and that I will touch on again, but nevertheless it requires journalists to either willingly reconfigure their self-image as objective seekers of truth or else to question the impositions that are being made on them by the state.

In the months since September 2001 we have seen a number of practices of the Bush administration which certainly evoke wartime proper in very relevant ways. For example, there has been a very tight rein of course over journalists on the ground in Afghanistan, to the extent that there have been journalists on the ground in Afghanistan. Clearly, in this particular case, the US military have been assisted by inhospitable terrain and of course for at least some of the time by extremely inhospitable Taliban, so the logistics haven't been propitious for a free-ranging journalism with nothing but a backpack satellite dish. Certainly in the United States, we didn't see a good deal of unilateral journalism of the kind that at least some reporters in the Gulf War attempted. There also has been a very considerable reluctance on the part of the Pentagon and the White House to release military news.

There has been limited discussion of this in the broadsheet American press and to the extent that there has been discussion the consensus seems to be that the impositions on the release of news have been even greater than in the 1991 Gulf War. It's been widely remarked that even in the Gulf War where there were considerable constraints put on the kind of reporting that the coalition would permit. Nevertheless some favoured journalists were clustered into pools and were actually stationed with US troops and could see them, however favourable and feature-orientated a journalism that produced.

That hasn't happened this time. There hasn't been any attempt to form pools of US news reporters and actually station them with troops. That has been rationalised on three grounds, the first of which is sensitivity to various coalition partners, particularly countries which may have domestic problems with it being well known that their soil is the base for US forces. Secondly, of course, because a number of the forces, at least initially, were special forces. The other rationalisation was that taking journalists along would jeopardise operational security, that the modus operandi of special forces can't simply be exposed to journalistic scrutiny. The argument is that these aren't like the infantry sent into the Gulf War, so there have to be different rules of engagement.

We have also seen, particularly from October onwards, a very concerted effort to manage and spin the news stories of the day. One striking aspect of this, though not unprecedented, is the degree to which women have featured as spin doctors. Much has been made in the US media of the fact that a number of the key media and PR personnel in the Bush Administration and those tasked with leading a media war against terrorism are women. The other prominent feature of the propaganda war, if you want to put it in those terms, waged by the White House is that at least in part the war against terrorism is also a war for women's rights. We have seen Laura Bush, the First Lady, for example, pressed into service-possibly, one might scurrilously suggest, because she can string a sentence together rather more fluently than her husband but also to support this prominent theme that one needs to build a liberal coalition to liberate women from the yoke of Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, one must add that casting wars as waged on behalf of civilisation against barbarism in terms of how it treats women, is not a new phenomenon.

We have also seen a concerted attempt to draw the entertainment media, not just news media, into a closer collaborative relationship with the White House. We have seen what I think historically is very typical sensitivity towards what might be termed terrorist propaganda, concerns such as that al-Jazeera footage of bin Laden might be a covert way for terrorists to send messages to one another. And, of course, the question that is now preoccupying America is the televising of trials. So that is my first theme, then: the war against terrorism as total war.

Patriot war
In America there has been an absolutely phenomenal upsurge of patriot sentiment in public and American life as well as in the media. It's impossible to overstate this, and I don't think this is because I happened to be in Washington where every federal building was draped in the Stars and Stripes. There is a phenomenal upsurge of patriotism-the flag flying everywhere, a wholesale manufacture of Star and Stripes-related merchandise, from ties to women's silk scarves to socks to you-name-it. Before Christmas, department stores were just full of patriotic gifts such as Calvin Klein striped underpants-if you could put a Stars and Stripes on it, there they would indeed be.

At least in the first instance, this was indeed an organic swelling of feeling in response to quite exceptional events and to the massive loss of life that occurred in September. So I don't think we could suggest, however much both the White House and the media may have tried to exploit and perpetuate it, that this was simply a top-down imposition. I don't think you can manufacture from nowhere a sentiment of that kind. What has been prevalent since then isn't just the commercialisation of this sort of patriot outpouring, but also its ubiquity. It's taken on an element almost of compulsory patriotism. Certainly in media organisations and television news media in particular, there really has been a sense that any pretence, any claim that one is impartial has simply gone by the board. It's very common-indeed it's almost obligatory-to see news anchors wear a Stars and Stripes lapel pin or tie pin to denote their support for America and to show their solidarity.

The NBC logo, which appears in the right hand corner of the television screen, at all times, not just at news broadcasts, has the Stars and Stripes in it. We have seen amongst journalists, particularly television, an almost total willingness to align themselves with the American cause. There are no debates, indeed a debate on the lines that Britain had during the Falklands/ Malvinas War or during the Gulf War, is inconceivable, those old debates about the BBC referring to the 'British troops' rather than 'our boys' and being lambasted by other sections of the media or by conservative backbenchers for a 'horrible display' of even-handedness. In the American television news media it's very clear that 'This is our war and we the media are thoroughly aligned with it.' There are no scruples about that wholehearted alignment with the war against terrorism and certainly no discussion as to whether or not this is indeed or should be a war.

So the issue of America's response to the attacks falls very much into what the academic Daniel Hallin might call this fear of consensus. This doesn't just apply to wars. It applies, in Hallin's terms, to some motherhood and apple pie issues, in other words issues which are so much beyond the scope of controversy that any sense of journalistic rules which require balance or objectivity and so reflect a range of views is simply an irrelevance. This is an issue of consensus and it can be reported in very different, much more celebratory, terms. There has been very little discussion really about the rectitude of the military response to the attacks of September.

There has been a repeated questioning in American public life and in the media about why the 'Arab world', why al-Qaeda in particular, hate Americans. But what I found striking as a visiting alien on American soil was the sort of limited parameters of acceptable answers to that question. Indeed some opinion-formers in the media suggested that it wasn't really appropriate to be asking the question about motives at all, that the attacks themselves were so inexcusable and so far into the realms of the psychotic and irrational that even to begin to try to fathom motives for them was to travel unacceptably far in the direction of excusing the attacks. So we have got this curious situation where repeatedly the Americans are asking, 'Why did they hate us, what does this mean, what did we do?' and yet a willingness to countenance only some answers to that question. In particular, it's suddenly very difficult to answer that question by making any reference to American foreign policy. In other words, to suggest that, at least as far as some quarters of Arabic opinion are concerned, American foreign policy may have something to do with that answer is very problematic. To suggest that perhaps America's long-standing support of Israel, the ongoing sanctions and periodic bombings of Iraq, the stationing of American troops on Saudi soil close to many sacred sights of Islam and so on, to suggest that others around the world have a less benign interpretation of American power is profoundly problematic for many Americans. Perhaps particularly in the New York Times even to broach that question is to open oneself to charges not just of near treason against the war on terrorism but also in some quarters of anti-Semitism. To criticise American policy vis-ˆ-vis Israel, if you look at the letters page in the New York Times, is often to be charged with being an anti-Semite.

All of these factors combine to produce a climate of very restricted speech about why the 11 September attacks actually happened. The kinds of explanations which are permissible of course then tend to be relegated to the realm of psychology, often ignoring the political dimensions of what might motivate anti-American sentiment, suggesting instead that people in the Middle East or in the 'Muslim world' are simply resentful of America's material success and that there's a sort of psychotic jealously at work amongst people who simply haven't been able to master modernity or get hip to globalisation. Or the argument is made that America symbolises certain values of freedom and tolerance which are anathema to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. So a set of explanations prevails in the media which tends to explain September 11 in terms of Emirate psychology.

What we have also seen is a sense, certainly in the Administration, that since these views are profoundly misguided, that they are therefore susceptible to being ameliorated and indeed changed if American propaganda, for want of a better word, does a better job of selling America to the world and in particular to the Muslim world. So in the months since the attacks we have periodically seen discussion of renewing a 'campaign of truth'. This was very relevant for me because I was in America working on a project on the early Cold War and a 'campaign of truth' is an early fifties phrase. President Truman in 1950 launched the first such campaign of truth designed to sell the virtues of the American way of life to those who might be susceptible to Soviet propaganda. There has been, then, a disinterring of a historical motif and discussion also of many of the same channels as being vehicles for launching a campaign of truth about American power and the benevolence of America's presence and role in the world. In particular a key priority of the State Department has been a beefed-up role for Voice of America and particularly VOA broadcasts in Pashtun and to the former Soviet Republics.

There have also been some very early Cold War debates about whether VOA itself perhaps was an untrustworthy organisation. Voice of America, founded during World War Two, is perhaps the nearest equivalent to the BBC World Service. Although it is, if anything, closer to the American state than BBC World Service to the British state, nevertheless by charter it's intended to be at least in its news presentation adherent to various principles of objectivity, and balance. Then in its editorial sections it can deliver a much more forthrightly pro-American line. This has got VOA into trouble in some quarters on Capitol Hill. In November a number of Republicans in Congress passed legislation which would appropriate funds to set up Radio Free Afghanistan very much along the lines of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and other Cold War expedients, which broadcast behind the Iron Curtain and which purported not to be anything to do with the American Government although clandestinely they were funded by the CIA. They were much more forthright in their anti-Soviet line and clearly a number of Republicans have been concerned that the VOA is too even-handed and that what is needed is something which makes no scruples about being both profoundly anti-Taliban and vehemently pro-American.

Another self-conscious invocation of World War Two has been the way that the White House from an early stage has sought to enmesh Hollywood into the campaign. What we perhaps need to bear in mind is that the Bush administration suddenly perceived that Hollywood was full of pinko-lefty Clinton-loving types. Certainly many of the more prominent studio executives as well as stars had lent their lustre to Gore's election campaign and before that to the cause of Clinton, so there really was work to be done to make sure that Hollywood was on side playing its part in the war against terrorism.

Now World War Two looms very large in all of this and in particular the recurrent motif has been Frank Capra's 'Why We Fight' series of motivational films produced during World War Two. A number of the famous American directors of the time-John Houston, John Ford-actually joined various branches of the US armed services to make patriotic films to commemorate the war effort in celluloid during the war. All that history of patriotic collaboration between the US military and Hollywood has been reanimated since September. This does pose certain questions. During World War Two a lot of Hollywood's patriotic film-making was really aimed at explaining and selling World War Two to an American public that often had a rather scant idea about what the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific were actually about. There was a profound job to be done to explain to Americans why the Allies were fighting the Axis powers and crucially why the World War also needed to be America's War, although after Pearl Harbour that wasn't quite such a problem. Hollywood's role was largely of selling the war to Americans, to American service personnel and then more widely to America's allies showing solidarity.

In this case it's harder to know exactly what's being conceived for Hollywood. Certainly already Hollywood is producing even more rapidly a spate of very pro-military war-themed films. On the other hand we might argue that Hollywood is precisely part of the problem-in other words, if you want to explain, as many people have done, the tensions and sentiments that produced the events of 11 September in the first place, as a part of a backlash against America and American cultural imperialism, then Hollywood looks rather more like part of the problem than part of the solution. It's not quite clear how Hollywood can alleviate that. Certainly if the intention is that Hollywood makes films that sell the American way of life, well, arguably Hollywood does very well at doing precisely that already, but exporting those films abroad may only exacerbate precisely those tensions.

The latest announcement from the world of Hollywood-White House liaison just before Christmas was that Hollywood would produce a short film aimed predominately at world Muslim opinion featuring Mohammed Ali as America's most famous convert to Islam, who would explain that the war against terrorism was not indeed a war against Islam. Of course there is some synergy between mobilising Mohammed Ali and the release on Christmas Day in the States of the new Will Smith vehicle, Ali. It's a curious overlap of fictionalising by Hollywood of Ali's life and then actually using him in person to perform this role.

Parochial War
One highly striking feature of the media war was how very inwardly focused it was. To a considerable extent, this confirms trends which have been visible for at least a decade and probably much longer than that. On the one hand the 1990s saw the rise of so-called global media, with CNN achieving its hegemony in that market largely thanks to the Gulf War, but on the other hand, while you have these 24-hour rolling news services with a more international cast, the kinds of news provided by American terrestrial broadcasters was increasingly parochial-this in a country which is not renowned for the percentage of news airtime devoted to foreign affairs in the first case.

The point I want to make here isn't just that there was remarkably little debate over the campaign of aerial bombardment and over the way the war against terrorism was prosecuted in Afghanistan. The point is more that, for at least much of the time, that simply wasn't the story. Instead two stories, or perhaps two parts of the same story, predominated: the aftermath of the attack on America itself, and in particular the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. Perhaps in journalistic terms one of the most striking developments was how the New York Times responded. It generated an entire new section called 'A Nation Challenged', dealing not only with the updates from Afghanistan and attempts to secure a global coalition, but also-and perhaps it was most read for this-two or three, sometimes four, pages devoted to small obituaries and photographs of those who had lost their lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. The section only came to an end on January 1, 2002, which the New York Times presumably felt was a suitable moment to reincorporate news about the war on terrorism within its main news pages.

One of the striking untold stories of those attacks is the large number of victims whose identities won't ever be known, the large number of illegal immigrant workers who were doing the invisible work of maintaining the Twin Towers and who lost their lives in the attacks. The huge volume of domestic coverage about the impact on America has had as a submerged subplot issues of race and immigration, a subplot that has surfaced periodically but often without being fully articulated. The obituaries are a case in point. By and large they of course memorialised the high-achieving brokers with Cantor Fitzgerald. The families of many of the cleaners, janitors and so on are simply too scared of being deported to report that their relatives lost their lives.

The second big story, certainly since October, has been anthrax. Again there was a somewhat visible racial subplot. Washington DC is an atypical American city in that white Americans are hugely outnumbered by Afro-Americans. But of course the division of labour is marked in that Afro-Americans tend to do the more menial jobs, as is indeed typical in American cities. What became clear in the anthrax story was the vast discrepancy between how the predominately, though not exclusively, white staffers on Capitol Hill were treated when the contaminated letter to Senator Tom Daschle was discovered, and how black workers were treated. Capitol Hill staff were immediately whisked away, given a 90-day course of antibiotics and so on, to the extent that some people I know who work there are actually more concerned about the long-term health effects of the attempts to decontaminate buildings than about the letter in the first place. In contrast, postal workers were dealt with very tardily once anthrax-laced letters were found in the postal depot in south Washington. In fact, only after some postal workers died were they given a handful, a four-days course, of antibiotics as a prophylactic.

The one caveat I would offer to my earlier comment about how little dissent we have seen about the conduct of the war against terrorism relates to this sphere of domestic politics. By November it was clear that the bipartisan coalition which had been absolutely flawless was beginning to come apart. It became possible on the Hill to criticise some aspects of how the war against terrorism was being waged, but more or less exclusively domestic elements. So questions about how anthrax was being handled and the whole fiasco of how baggage was handled in the airports were raised.

By way of conclusion, let me just offer a few more generalised thoughts and a little bit of historical context about war in the media and in particular about the extent to which terrorism may be a particular case of what already may be a particular case, in other words war. I found myself wanting to nuance my conclusions. Clearly, campaigns against what is called terrorism generate particular rules. The attacks and their aftermath have led to a state of relations between the White House and journalists and between journalists and their publics which demonstrates elements of exceptionalism.

Nevertheless, many of the phenomena that I tried to draw out in my remarks can be fitted into a broader set of phenomena which recur when states try to deal with terrorism-and terrorism itself falls into a curious grey area both legally and morally with respect to war and to the rules of war. Do no rules apply when one seems to be dealing with an enemy which almost by definition doesn't abide either by peacetime juridical codes or by codes that have evolved governing just war conduct? So terrorism itself occurs in this odd condition of profound uncertainty about what rules, if any, might apply.

We have seen in this case, as we have seen in many other campaigns against terrorism, that journalists are profoundly anxious about behaving in ways that might be construed as supportive of terrorism or perhaps insufficiently supportive of a state's campaign against terrorism. Since no one really knows who the terrorists might be, how to target them or how to defeat them, that leads to a good deal of flexibility as to what kinds of behaviour might be inadmissible or dangerous.

Then there's the whole idea of a symbiotic relationship between terrorists and news organisations, which has a very long history, not just to Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum that publicity is the oxygen of terrorism, but back through the twentieth century, certainly to the 1940s when British governments were facing what they called terrorism in Palestine or to places like Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus in the 1940s and 1950s. The idee fixe, the conventional wisdom, has been that terrorists were essentially publicity seekers and that wittingly or otherwise news organisations end up playing into the terrorists' hands. That of course makes journalists very cautious about the very easily made charge that their behaviour is in some way or other aiding the cause of terrorism. Perhaps one of the sorest points that recurs in such campaigns is the question of interviews-is it appropriate to interview terrorists or so-called terrorists and terrorist suspects in the news media, particularly on television? Recurrently there is a debate between those who think that any appearance is going to legitimise and lend unwarranted credibility to such individuals and those who would argue that if you put such people on television they will in fact do a far more effective job of damning themselves than official propaganda ever could.

In this case I think we have seen the pendulum swing quite markedly from the initial position of the Administration, which was to want to prohibit any appearances by al-Qaeda spokesmen, towards a position of it being more beneficial to the state to air footage of bin Laden so that normal people will realise how beyond the pale he is. So my final conclusion, then, is that terrorism is, yes, sui generis. Nevertheless, if we look back historically we can find that there are precedents both for how media disport themselves vis-à-vis states in peacetime but also recurrent parallels with other wars against terrorism.