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6 SEPTEMBER 11 AND THE STRUCTURAL LIMITATIONS OF US JOURNALISM

Robert W. McChesney

The questions before us are elementary. What explains the nature of US news media coverage of the political response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States? Is September 11 a defining event for US journalism? We have been roundly told that “September 11 changes everything,” but does it change journalism? I argue that the US press coverage of the political response to the September 11 attacks was exactly what one would expect from looking at historical precedent. September 11 may be changing a lot of things about our world, but with regard to journalism it has merely highlighted the antidemocratic tendencies already in existence.

The war against terrorism and the US press coverage

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, for most Americans, were similar in effect to having a massive attack from outer space. Almost entirely ignorant of global politics, devoid of any understanding of the Islamic world, educated primarily by Hollywood movies featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone, Americans were ideally prepared for a paranoid and hysterical response. Mix in an opportunistic class of politicians and powerful special interests that benefit by militarism, and you have the recipe for much of what transpired thereafter. The immediate consequence of the September 11 attack was for Congress to pass, by a virtually unanimous vote, and with no substantive debate, an act granting President George W. Bush the power to engage in global war against enemies he is free to define with little accountability to Congress. At the same time Congress authorized a sharp increase in military, intelligence, and national security spending. Within a few weeks the United States began its aerial bombings of Afghanistan. In his public statements President Bush was emphatic that the United States was engaged in a global war on terrorism, and that those nations and peoples who did not support the US effort would be regarded as sympathetic to the enemy

Zelizer, B., & Allan, S. (Eds.). (2011). Journalism after september 11. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from pensu on 2020-08-31 19:28:12.

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and dealt with accordingly. Insofar as this was a war without borders, that logic would apply domestically as well as abroad. Moreover, this was to be a war with no end in sight, for as long as terrorists lurked the prospect of another deadly attack loomed, and our forces needed to be on guard. Pre-emptive strikes were justified and necessary. The initial name the US government gave for the war, Operation Infinite Justice, captured the world-historical nature of the conflict. In short, we were in the early stages of World War III.

Central to this process were the news media, and the media system more broadly. Moments like these are the “moments of truth,” so to speak, for establishing the commitment to democracy of a nation’s media system. The decision to enter war, not to mention world war, is arguably the most important any society can make. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, even tens of millions, of lives will be lost, and those that survive will be vastly less happy than they would have been otherwise. The political- economic cost of war is very high as well. Standards of living must be cut, govern- ment non-military services reduced, and civil liberties curtailed. In a free society, such a decision must be made with the informed consent of the governed. Otherwise, the claim to be a democratic nation is dubious, if not fraudulent.

Over the last hundred years, as the United States has emerged as the dominant economic and military power in the world, it has engaged in hundreds of wars and invasions and bombing missions across the planet. According to a list compiled by the Congressional Research Service, the United States has employed its military forces in other countries over 70 times since 1945, not counting innumerable instances of counterinsurgency operations by the CIA. The American people were ignorant of most of these actions; they were made in our name but without our informed consent. Such is the price of being the dominant superpower in the world.

When the wars go from quickie carpet bombings or bankrolling mercenaries and death squads to full-scale hostilities, the citizenry cannot remain in the dark. Gov- ernments need active support for the war effort, both to pay for the cost of war, and to provide the soldiers willing to die for the war. It has proven to be a difficult job in the United States to enlist such popular support for war. Over the last hundred years the US government has worked aggressively to convince the citizenry of the necessity of going to war in numerous instances. In cases like World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, the government employed sophisticated propaganda campaigns to whip the population into a suitable fury. Candidates won the presidency in 1916 and 1964 on peace platforms when the record shows they were working diligently to go to war. It was well understood within the establishment at the time—and subse- quently verified in historical examinations—that the government needed to lie in order to gain support for its war aims. The Pentagon Papers provided the most chilling documentation imaginable of this process.

And how have the media served us during these various war campaigns? Despite all the talk about being a feisty Fourth Estate, the media system in every one of those cases proved to be a superior propaganda organ for militarism and war. This is widely understood among US journalism educators, and when we teach of these historic episodes of journalism it tends to be addressed with remorse and concern. This is the

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context for understanding the media coverage since September 11. The historical record suggests that we should expect an avalanche of lies and half-truths in the ser- vice of power. Journalists, the news media, should be extremely skeptical, demanding evidence for claims, opening the door to other policy options, and asking the tough questions that nobody in power wants to address; the historical track record is emphatic in this regard. Such a free press would “serve the governed, not the governors,” as Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black once put it.

What is most striking in the US news coverage following the September 11 attacks is how that very debate over whether to go to war, or how best to respond, did not even exist. It was presumed, almost from the moment the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, that the United States was at war, world war. The picture conveyed by the media was as follows: A benevolent, democratic, and peace-loving nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hated the United States for its freedoms and affluent way of life. The United States needed immediately to increase its military and covert forces, locate the surviving culprits and exterminate them; then prepare for a long-term war to root out the global terrorist cancer and destroy it.

In fact, the leap from the September 11 attacks to unchecked world war was hardly natural or a given. Extraordinarily logical questions, questions that would be posed by US journalists arguably to any other government in a similar situation, were ignored or marginalized. Why should we believe that a militarized approach would be effective? Moving beyond the September 11 attacks, why should the United States be entitled to determine—as judge, jury, and executioner—who is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer in this global war? What about international law? Why shouldn’t this be regarded like most other terrorist acts, as crimes against humanity and not as formal acts of war? The list went on and on.

Most conspicuous was the complete absence of comment on one of the most striking features of the war campaign, something that any credible journalist would be quick to observe were the events taking place in Russia or China or Pakistan: There are very powerful interests in the United States who greatly benefit politically and economically by the establishment of an unchecked war on terrorism. This con- sortium of interests can be called, to use President Eisenhower’s term, the military- industrial complex. It blossomed during the Cold War when the fear of Soviet imperialism—real or alleged—justified its creation and expansion. A nation with a historically small military now had a permanent war economy, and powerful special interests benefited by its existence.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US military-industrial complex has thus been seeking a substitute for the Cold War with which to justify its massive budgets and privileges. Various alternatives have been offered: a war on terrorism, the struggle against “rogue states,” a “clash of civilizations” (Islam and China versus the West, offered up as a proposal by Samuel Huntington), a war on the global drug trade, and humanitarian intervention—all of them up to now seen as unsatisfactory, but suffi- cient to keep the military budget from shrinking drastically after the Cold War. As General Colin Powell voiced the problem in 1991: “Think hard about it. I’m

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running out of demons. I’m running out of villains” (Toronto Star 1991; see also Gibbs 2001). The military lobbyists so dominated Washington politics that both parties agreed to maintain high levels of military spending, even with no powerful adversary. In 2000 the United States accounted for around one-third of all military spending in the world.

The war on terrorism was a gift from heaven for the military-industrial complex. (Just like the military response to terrorism may well be a gift from heaven to the terrorists.) It justified vast increases in budgets and power, and less accountability to Congress. It was a war that was endless and could never be won. And it was a war that the public would never have any way of monitoring, since the terrorist enemy was by definition detached from governments that could be defeated. Moreover, the very nature of terrorism lent itself to a hysteria that was highly conducive to emotional support for war and discouraging to the possibility of rational inquiry.

For journalists to raise issues like these did not presuppose that they opposed government policies, merely that the policies needed to be justified and explained, so the support would be substantive, not ephemeral, the result of deliberation, not manipulation. Such has not been the case.

In sum, much of mainstream US journalism has been, to be frank, propagandistic. The propagandistic nature of the war coverage was made crystal clear by CNN a few weeks after the war began in Afghanistan. CNN was not only the leading US cable news network; it was the leading global cable and satellite news network. Yet the war has put CNN in a pickle. If it broadcast the pro-US coverage it generated in the United States to international audiences, audiences would react negatively. Interna- tional audiences received a much more critical take on the war and the US role in their newspapers and other media, and they would not watch CNN if it was seen as a front for the Bush administration. On the other hand, if CNN presented such critical coverage to US audiences, it would outrage people in power here. CNN President Walter Isaacson solved this dilemma by authorizing CNN to provide two different versions of the war: a critical one for global audiences and a sugarcoated one for Americans. Indeed, Isaacson instructed the domestic CNN to be certain that any story that might undermine support for the US war needed to be balanced with a reminder that the war on terrorism was a good war.

In this climate it should be no surprise that most Americans supported the war, though they knew next to nothing about the region we were fighting in and its history, or the US role in the world.

The structural limitations on US journalism

This distorted coverage reflects the weaknesses of professional journalism as it has been practiced in the United States, as well as the control of our major news media by a very small number of very large and powerful profit-seeking corporations. It does not reflect explicit state censorship. As George Orwell observed, the genius of censorship in free societies is that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban” (cited in Pilger 1998: 486).

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As I will argue, the coverage following September 11 conformed to the main pattern of US news coverage on other important political stories in recent years.

Professional journalism emerged in the United States around 100 years ago for a handful of important reasons. One crucial factor was the need among monopoly newspaper owners to offer a credible “non-partisan” journalism so that their business enterprises would not be undermined. To avoid the taint of partisanship, profession- alism makes official or credentialed sources the basis for news stories. Reporters report what people in power say, and what they debate. This tends to give the news an establishment bias. When a journalist reports what official sources are saying, or debating, she is professional. When she steps outside this range of official debate to provide alternative perspectives or to raise issues those in power prefer not to discuss, she is no longer being professional. Background stories and contextual pieces that contradict and compromise the range of debate among official sources may appear briefly in the news, but they die off quickly without official source amplification. Most journalists have so internalized this primary role as stenographers for official sources that they do not recognize it as a problem for democracy. The best profes- sional journalism is when there are clear and distinct debates between official sources; this provides considerable room for journalists to roam as they prepare their stories.

In matters of international politics, the phrase “official sources” is almost inter- changeable with the term “elites,” as foreign policy is mostly the preserve of the wealthy and powerful few—C. Wright Mills’ classic power elite. At its worst, in a case like the current war on terrorism, where the elites and official sources are unified on the core issues, the nature of our press coverage is uncomfortably close to that found in authoritarian societies with limited formal press freedom.

Many working journalists would recoil at that statement. Their response would be that professional reliance on official sources is justifiable as “democratic” because the official sources are elected or accountable to people who are elected by the citizenry. This is a crucial issue, so permit me a bit of a digression from the discussion of September 11. The problem with this rationale for stenography is that it forgets a critical assumption of free press theory: Even leaders determined by election need a rigorous monitoring, the range of which cannot be determined solely by their elected opposition. Otherwise the citizenry has no way out of the status quo, no capacity to criticize the political culture as a whole. If such a watchdog function grows lax, cor- ruption invariably grows, and the electoral system decays. If journalism that goes outside the range of elite opinion is dismissed as unprofessional or partisan, and therefore justifiably ignored, the media merely locks in a corrupt status quo and can offer no way out. If journalists require having official sources on their side to pursue a story, it gives people in power a massive veto power over the exercise of democracy.

Consider the Enron scandal which unfolded in late 2001 and the early months of 2002. Although this was a stunning example of supreme political corruption—a story that could topple governments in many nations—the coverage increasingly con- centrated upon the business collapse of Enron, rather than the sleazy way in which it worked, legally as well as illegally, using the political system to make billions of dollars ripping off consumers, taxpayers, and workers. Why did it not turn into a political

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crisis that ended careers and led to major reform? Because the opposition Democrats were in no hurry to push the story to its logical political conclusion, since so many of them would have been implicated as well. So professional journalism is restricted to the range of what those in power pursue, and the balance of the population has no one representing its interests. What about those who simply want the whole truth to come out, and the system changed so this sort of corruption is less likely to ever occur in the future? They are out of luck.

Another telling example is the manner in which the press reported President Bush’s “victory” in the 2000 election. It is now clear that the majority of the people in Florida who went to vote for President in November 2000 intended to vote for Al Gore (see Vidal 2001). The semi-official recount conducted by the major news media in 2001 showed that by every conceivable way the votes might be counted Al Gore won Florida (see also Nichols 2001). But Al Gore wasn’t President. Why is that? Or, to put it another way, why didn’t the press coverage assure that the true winner would assume office? After all, if the free press cannot guarantee the integrity of elections, what good is it? The primary reason is due to sourcing: Throughout November and early December of 2000, the news media were being told by all Republicans that the Republicans had won the election and Al Gore was trying to steal it. The Democrats, on the other hand, were far less antagonistic and showed much less enthusiasm to fight for what they had won. Hence the news coverage, reflecting what their sources were telling them, tended to reflect the idea that the Republicans had won and the Democrats were grasping for straws. When Greg Palast broke the story in Britain in November 2000 that the Florida Republicans had sys- tematically and illegally excluded thousands of poor Floridians from voting—in itself, almost certainly enough to cost Gore the state—no US mainstream news medium dared pick it up, though the story was true. Why? Most likely this was because journalists would have been out on their own, because the Democrats had elected not to fight on this issue (see Palast 2002). Once the Supreme Court made its final decision, the media were elated to announce that our national nightmare was over. The media had helped anoint a President. The only losers were the irrelevant and powerless souls who clung to the belief that whoever gets the most votes should win the election, and that the press should tell the whole truth and let the chips fall where they may.

The willingness of the mainstream US news media to suspend criticism of President Bush almost in toto after September 11 should be considered in this light. When the recount report indicating that Gore won Florida was released two months after September 11, what was striking was how almost all of the press reported that the results were mixed or that Bush had won. The reason for the press making this judgment was it only looked at the recount in the few counties where Al Gore had requested it; who actually won the actual election in Florida seemed not to interest the press one whit. In a manner of thinking, the press had no choice but to provide this interpretation. If the media conceded that Gore, in fact, had won the race in Florida, it would have made people logically ask, “Why didn’t the media determine this when it mattered?” Moreover, a concession that the United States had an

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unelected President would make the laudatory coverage of President Bush after September 11 look increasingly like the sort that paeans to “maximum leaders” expected from the news media in tinhorn dictatorships. As soon as the leaders are not the product of free and fair elections, the professional reliance on official sources—which is wobbly by democratic standards to begin with—collapses.

In addition to this reliance on official sources, experts are also crucial to explaining and debating policy, especially in complex stories like this one. As with sources, experts are drawn almost entirely from the establishment. Since September 11, the range of “expert” analysis has been limited mostly to the military and intelligence communities and their supporters, with their clear self-interest in the imposition of military solutions rarely acknowledged and almost never critically examined. Since there has been virtually no debate between the Democrats and Republicans over the proper response, the military approach has simply been offered as the only option. As National Public Radio’s Cokie Roberts put it on October 8 when asked on air if there was any domestic opposition to the bombing of Afghanistan: “None that mattered.”

The full-throttle jingoism of the press coverage was tempered by late September, as it became clear that a full-blown war might be counterproductive to US military and political aims. The range of debate has broadened somewhat in elite circles, with some assuming the more “internationalist” position that the United States needed to win the “hearts and minds” of potential adversaries through more sophisticated peaceful measures, as well as have an unmatched military. This expansion of elite debate will almost certainly lead to a broadening of journalism, but this should not be confused with a genuine democratic debate or democratic journalism. Fundamental issues will remain decidedly off limits. The role of the military as the ultimate source of power will not be questioned. The notion that the United States is a uniquely benevolent force in the world will be undisputed. The premise that the United States and the United States alone—unless it deputizes a nation like Israel—has a right to invade any country it wants at any time if it so wishes will remain undebatable. And any concerns that US military actions will violate international law will be raised not on principle, but only because it might harm US interests to be perceived by other nations as a lawbreaker.

Here we should recall the media coverage of the US invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. From the time the United States launched its ground invasion in earnest, in 1965, until late 1967 or early 1968, the news coverage was a classic example of the “big lie” of all war propaganda. The war was good and necessary for freedom and democracy; those who opposed it were trivialized, marginalized, dis- torted, or ignored. By 1968 the coverage began to take a more charitable stance toward antiwar positions. But while it reflected growing public opposition to the war to a certain degree, this coverage was influenced much more by the break that emerged in US elite opinion by this time: some on Wall Street and in Washington realized that the cost of the war was far too high for any prospective benefits and favored getting out. The news coverage remained within the confines of elite opinion. The United States still had a “007” right to invade any nation it wished; the only debate was whether the invasion of Vietnam was a proper use of that power. The notion that the

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very idea of the United States invading nations like Vietnam was morally wrong was off limits, although surveys revealed that such a view was not uncommon in the general population.

Another flaw of establishment journalism is that it tends to avoid contextualization like the plague. The reason for this is that providing meaningful context and back- ground for stories, if done properly, tends to commit the journalist to a definite position and enmesh him in the controversy professionalism is determined to avoid. Coverage tends to be a barrage of facts and official statements. What little con- textualization professional journalism does provide tends to conform to elite premises. So it is that on those stories that receive the most coverage, like the Middle East, Americans tend to be almost as ignorant as on those subjects that receive far less coverage. Such journalism is more likely to produce confusion, cynicism, and apathy than understanding and informed action. Hence one of the paradoxes of professional journalism: It is arguably better at generating ignorance and apathy than informed and passionately engaged citizens.

Structural limitations and September 11

Considerable context and background have been generated in the US news media since September 11, but the context conforms to elite premises. So it is that there have been numerous detailed reports on Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, and related investigations of factors concerning the success or failure of prospective military actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Information about the fundamental context that falls outside the range of US elite interests may appear periodically, but it gets little follow-up and has negligible impact. This becomes abundantly clear when one peruses the Internet to see what is being reported in the international press or in the US independent and alternative media. Here, one often finds stories about US complicity and the complicity of US allies with terrorists and terrorism. Here, one is more likely to find a much more complex world where the US government’s motives are held to the same standard as those of other governments. (See, for example, the superior US website, www.accuracy.org, which collects much of this material.) But these stories, often by world-renowned journalists like Robert Fisk, are all but unknown in the news consumed by the preponderance of the US population.

The weaknesses of the coverage are augmented by the structural context for US journalism. Over the past two decades the US news media have become con- solidated into the hands of a very small number of enormous media conglomerates. For many of them, journalism accounts for a small percentage of their revenues and profit. These new owners have paid huge sums to acquire their media empires, and they expect to generate maximum returns from their assets. Accordingly, a baldly commercial logic has been applied to journalism in recent years. As a result, among other things, the number of overseas correspondents has been slashed, and inter- national political coverage has plummeted, as that is expensive and generates little revenue. Whereas Americans once tended to be misinformed about world politics, now they are uninformed. The US citizenry is embarrassingly and appallingly

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www.accuracy.org

ignorant of the most elementary political realities in other nations and regions. It is an unmitigated disaster for the development of a meaningful democratic debate over international policy, and highlights a deep contradiction between the legitimate informational needs of a democratic society and the need for profit of the corporate media.

The US media corporations also exist within an institutional context that makes support for the US military seemingly natural. These giant firms are among the pri- mary beneficiaries of both neoliberal globalization—their revenues outside the United States are increasing at a rapid pace—and the US role as the pre-eminent world power. Indeed, the US government is the primary advocate for the global media firms when trade deals and intellectual property agreements are being nego- tiated. Coincidentally, at the very moment that the corporate broadcasters are singing the praises of “America’s New War,” their lobbyists are appearing before the Federal Communications Commission seeking radical relaxation of ownership regulations for broadcasting, newspaper, and cable companies. Such deregulation will, by all accounts, lead to another massive wave of media consolidation. For these firms to provide an understanding of the world in which the US military and economic interests are not benevolent forces might be possible in some arcane twisted theory, but it is incongruous practically.

There is no simple or easy solution to the complex problem of how to best pro- vide for a journalism that serves democracy, especially when powerful forces are pounding the drums of war. But it is a problem that must be addressed if we are to have any prospect of living in a humane and self-governing society. A viable solution ultimately will require reform of our media system, as well as broader reform of the US political economy. But this is not an issue to be decided here; it is an issue that deserves the attention and participation of all concerned with the future of democracy and peaceful international relations.

Note

Parts of this essay appeared in an earlier form in McChesney, R. W. (2002) “The US news media and World War III,” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, 3 (1): 14–21.

References

Gibbs, D. N. (2001) Washington’s new interventionism, Monthly Review, 53, September: 15–37.

Nichols, J. (2001) Jews for Buchanan, New York: The New Press. Palast, G. (2002) The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, London: Pluto Press. Pilger, J. (1998) Hidden Agendas, London: Vintage. Toronto Star (1991) General advocates cuts to US military budget, April 9: A3. Vidal, G. (2001) Times cries eke! Buries Al Gore, The Nation, December 17: 13–15.

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