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America keeps its blinkers on by Nick Higham 
British Journalism Review Vol. 13, No. 1, 2002, pages 13-18 You know it goes on, but when you encounter it first hand it's still a shock. Arriving in Washington for a two-week stint helping out in the BBC bureau at the height of the Afghan war, I thought I knew what to expect as a journalist operating in the Land of the Free and the First Amendment. Even so, the torrent of information, the deluge of facts, the tidal wave of briefings and press conferences that flood into newsrooms in America was simply staggering. This is a society which really does take freedom of information seriously. Most staggering of all, when American Airlines flight 587 crashed on take-off from JFK, the National Transportation Safety Board was holding a live televised press briefing within three hours - and three a day in the week that followed. Admittedly the circumstances were exceptional. So soon after 11 September the authorities and the aviation industry were keen to establish as quickly as possible if this were another terrorist attack - and, if it wasn't, to reassure the travelling public. Yet the contrast with the way these things are done in Britain was stark. As a general policy, the Air Accident Investigation Branch makes no comment ahead of its final report into a disaster, and certainly won't hold briefings which could lead its investigators into dangerous speculation. After Hatfield, Selby and Paddington the Health & Safety Executive, which conducts investigations into rail crashes, rushed out interim reports - but reporters had to wait a week for them. Daily televised briefings? In Britain? Forget it. Covering the war itself and the concurrent anthrax scare meant trying to keep abreast of daily press conferences (televised of course) from the White House and the Pentagon, and occasional press briefings from the State Department, the Director of Homeland Security, the Mayor of New York, the Attorney-General and assorted members of Congress, as well as monitoring the main metropolitan newspapers, CNN, the networks and the output of the regular news agencies. It was a bit like working in a sausage-factory, processing vast quantities of raw material coming in at one end of the BBC bureau, and turning them into voice-pieces, television packages and two-ways extruded at the other end. The problem wasn't so much finding out what was going on as making sense of the sheer volume of information. Gradually two things dawned on me. The first was that, even in a culture as notionally committed to openness as the US, spin survives. The off-the-record briefing is alive and flourishing. Though they complained that security worries had made many of their regular contacts shy of talking, the network correspondents and their colleagues on CNN and in the newspapers clearly had sources beyond the public press conferences - sources not available to a foreign news organisation like the BBC. The second realisation was that, however much American journalists may value fair and impartial reporting and the separation of news and comment, there is a bias in the US news media, and never more so than when the nation thinks itself at war. It's a bias in favour of patriotism. At its simplest you could see it on screen. There were the belligerent straplines on the continuous news channels: "America at War", "America under Attack", "Update on Terror"; the CNN banner still had the stars and stripes on it four months after 11 September. NBC's multicoloured peacock emblem was recast in red, white and blue. Presenters on the Fox News network wore stars and stripes lapel badges. Newspapers devoted pages to the war - not least the New York Times's daily section, A Nation Challenged, which brought together news and comment on the war with sometimes touching, sometimes bathetic obituaries of every person known to have died in the World Trade Centre. And US networks showed none of the squeamishness of their British equivalents in endlessly rerunning pictures of the fireballs as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. Some called the coverage hopelessly superficial. A New York Times critic was scathing. "After two months, American television's cautious approach [to covering the war] has turned into a knee-jerk pandering to the public, reflecting a mood of patriotism rather than informing viewers of the complex, sometimes harsh realities they need to know," she wrote. "Even as American reporters are expressing frustration at how fiercely the Pentagon is controlling information, the emphasis is not on getting better answers but on covering the 'propaganda war' in the shallow, horse-race way elections usually are - who's winning?" The bias was evident in the selection of voices heard - and not heard - on air. The polls suggested more than 90 per cent of Americans supported the President and his policy on Afghanistan. Even so there were dissenters - yet they were rarely heard. Some television producers complained it was hard to find credible opponents of the war prepared to go on television; Phil Donahue, a former television talk show host and critic of the war, maintained there was no shortage of people like him prepared to speak out - the problem was reluctance on the part of programme-makers to put them on screen. In fact Donahue was interviewed on Fox News - but another New York Times writer suggested that was a reflection of Fox's conservative bent, and the fact that one of its star presenters enjoys baiting liberals and leftists. "Most viewers, still aching over the attacks of Sept 11, are in no mood to listen to views they dismiss as either loopy or treasonous," she wrote. Outrage When Bill Maher, presenter of ABC's late night show Politically Incorrect, suggested that the US military response to 11 September had been "cowardly" (because it involved lobbing cruise missiles at Afghanistan from 2,000 miles away) there was outrage. Advertisers like Sears and Fedex cancelled their spots in the show. Maher himself was reputedly almost fired, and certainly incurred the wrath of the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer who said: "Americans need to watch what they say& This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." Journalists were divided over whether Fleischer was behaving like a member of the thought police, or simply reminding everyone of the dangers of irresponsible comments at an especially sensitive time. Fleischer himself said he was worried about a growing climate of intolerance towards Muslims in America, and feared careless remarks could inflame tensions. Bill Maher's experience seemed to contribute to widespread self-censorship among other journalists and broadcasters. One TV director opposed to the war refused to let the Los Angeles Times quote him for fear of being "Maher-ized". As Walter Isaacson, the president of CNN, said: "If you get on the wrong side of public opinion, you're going to get into trouble." When dissent was reported, it often came from right-wing critics who felt the war wasn't being prosecuted vigorously enough. And when General Tommy Franks, the man running the military campaign, made a rare appearance at a Pentagon briefing he got a rough ride from reporters. At the time, despite several weeks of bombing, Northern Alliance forces had yet to move and Taliban resistance showed no signs of crumbling. Why, the reporters wanted to know, were US forces and their allies apparently making so little progress? "General," one remarked, "you're no Norman Schwarzkopf " - a reference not only to Franks's comparative lack of swagger but also (at that stage) to his lack of the visible success enjoyed by the victor of the Gulf War. Despite the American commitment to openness and despite the widespread domestic support for military action, the Bush administration made strenuous efforts to manage the news. Newspapers and broadcasters complained about the limited access they were granted once the bombing campaign had begun. Guidelines drawn up by the Pentagon and the media after the Gulf War were being observed in the letter but not the spirit. Reporters had been ferried out to aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean - but once there found pilots would tell them little about their missions. But with the domestic audience firmly on side, a greater priority for the administration was fighting the propaganda war abroad - and here, hampered by past failures and America's isolationist ethos, it found itself struggling. It scored an own goal early on when the State Department instructed Voice of America, the government-controlled overseas broadcaster, not to transmit a telephone interview with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar obtained by an enterprising staffer. News of the ban can have done little for VoA's already shaky credibility in the Muslim world. It had more success with an initiative co-ordinated by Alastair Campbell and Karen Hughes, George W Bush's communications chief, to establish "coalition information centres" in Islamabad, London and Washington to counter Taliban claims about civilian casualties. But such tactical propaganda initiatives could only do so much to overturn the deep suspicion of America and its motives in some parts of the world. So as the bombs started to fall on Afghanistan the State Department's newest high-level recruit, Charlotte Beers, announced a series of "public diplomacy" initiatives to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Ms Beers, known as the Queen of Madison Avenue, previously ran two of America's top advertising agencies and earlier in her career helped establish Head and Shoulders as a leading shampoo brand (which led the acerbic New York Times columnist Frank Rich to comment of her appointment: "If we can't effectively fight anthrax, I guess it's reassuring to know we can always win the war on dandruff "). She had in fact been appointed before 11 September to "rebrand" America. Under President Clinton, America's public diplomacy had been run down; the US Information Agency had been abolished and its functions taken over by the State Department; budgets had been slashed. Even before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Colin Powell had identified a potential problem and invited Beers to fix it. Priority Making up for lost time in defending America's tarnished reputation suddenly became a high priority. Beers produced copious briefing material for US embassies and sympathisers abroad, including a colour brochure entitled "Defending Freedom, Defeating Terror" outlining America's position on the war, full of photographs of 11 September - many, she said, never seen in the Muslim world - and demonising Osama bin Laden. She sought to start a "dialogue" with the Muslim world - depicting America as a land of freedom, tolerance and diversity of opinion and contrasting it with the "emotionalism", "irrationality" and lack of respect for human rights of the Taliban and Al Qaida. And she was credited with persuading her colleagues to engage with the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera. After effectively boycotting the channel to begin with, the State Department brought out of retirement a former ambassador and fluent Arabic speaker, Christopher Ross, to act as its regular front man. The State Department's belated realisation of its past errors reflected similar heart-searching in much of the US media. To many Americans the attacks came, metaphorically as well as literally, out of the blue. "Why weren't we told?" the cry went up. Constant cuts in television news budgets and a general downgrading and marginalisation of foreign news had contributed to widespread ignorance among the general public of quite how much America was loathed in certain quarters abroad. Will 11 September change that? It seems unlikely. America's isolationism (or self-sufficiency, to put it more kindly) has deep roots. The popular media reflect that - and they reflect commercial imperatives. Middle America's fascination with Afghanistan and the Twin Towers showed no signs, in November at least, of translating into a desire to engage with the rest of the world in a new way. There is no mass market for foreign news. If you want serious foreign coverage in America you have to look abroad. Several commentators compared US coverage of Afghanistan unfavourably with the British equivalents, as seen and heard on the BBC World Service and on BBC World and ITN's World News. "The BBC is known for crisp on-scene reporting, a tendency to determinedly grill a subject until a question is answered and, in this war, a view of the American-led military campaign that BBC fans find refreshingly objective, and that foes consider downright anti-American," said the Boston Globe. The same New York Times critic who was so critical of American television news praised the wider scope, blunter approach and lack of "sugar-coating" of the British news programmes. "The range of issues and less defensive tone are wildly different from what American viewers get on network or cable news programmes, which share a myopic view and a tone that says, 'They'd love us if only they understood us'." And she praised the British programmes' continuing coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "For American television, with its relentless focus on a single issue, covering anthrax and the Middle East at the same time is the news equivalent of walking and chewing gum." But while the market for foreign news may be tiny, the market for escapism remains as buoyant as ever - and that's the way many Americans like it. One of the most popular films of the autumn in America was Disney's animated feature Monsters Inc, a film about facing up to one's worst fears. But when Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, called the film "spiritually beautiful" he was referring not to its message but to its box office take |
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