A shallow media can inflict deep damage.

Hellinger, Daniel

News of the attack came early on Sept. 11. A voice, emotionally shaken, said the jets were swooping in for the attack. Smoke billowed from public buildings regarded as embodiments of national greatness and sovereignty. Many people were already dead, and many more would die beneath the rubble. Democracy was under attack.

It was Chile, 1973. President Salvador Allende was on the radio announcing the bombardment of La Monea, the presidential palace. Allende would die that day beneath the rubble. The pilots were American-trained. Some Chileans think Americans themselves flew the sorties. The intellectual authors of this terror were General Augusto Pinochet and the United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

The images of the crumbling World Trade Center towers in New York have left an even darker stain on the calendar date of Sept. 11. Rarely have photos and video images packed such an emotional wallop. They were followed by other images, less violent, that seemed to bait us in our hour of anguish and shock. Over and over the media played video of Palestinians dancing in the streets, and newspapers across the country ran a photo of a group Pakistanis holding a banner that read, "Americans, think about why the world hates you."

Was this really the reaction of most of the world? Under the headline, "America, We Feel Your Pain. Do You Feel Ours?" Ramzy Baroud of The Palestine Chronicle (Sept. 14) said that after the Gulf War "in the United States military people celebrated the victory; unlike Palestinians, where only a dozen kids rushed to the street to celebrate the killing of Americans, nearly every American newspaper, TV station, millions of people, their representatives, young and old danced for the death of Iraqis."

Baroud charged that images of Palestinians leaving flowers and shedding tears were ignored.

Perhaps the question ought to be asked, why there were not more celebrations?

Why wouldn't the many thousands more Palestinians, Chileans and others victimized by U.S. support for terrorism feel at least some joy mixed with remorse and sympathy for the innocent victims of Sept. 11? Why should those being left impoverished by the astounding growth of global inequality over the past two decades not take some satisfaction watching the sacred towers of globalization tumble?

The answer may seem obvious. No one should celebrate the deaths of innocents, regardless of the motives and explanations of the causes. To ignore the latter, as the media, especially the punditocracy, have done or to write off the celebrations as mere envy at our prosperity is to invite an escalation of the violence.

Learning from the past?

If the American media resisted stereotyping Arab and Muslim-Americans at home, they were considerably less sensitive in presenting the views of people in the Middle East itself. Baroud complains that scenes of Palestinian sympathy were underplayed, but just the opposite occurred with the images of celebration. "Every major American news network prides itself with having its own exclusive footage and reporting," he wrote. "When it came to the scene of the dozen dancing Palestinians, they were willing to share the report, which was syndicated all over the world, and aired endlessly. A quick conclusion was drawn: Palestinians dance on the pain of Americans."

The dominant themes in media coverage, particularly among political pundits, portray the terrorism as an "attack on democracy" or "an attack on our way of life." Imagine a Palestinian, lucky to earn $400 a year in a squalid Gaza refugee camp viewing the image of shiny, black Monteros in line for a fix of hydrocarbons. Our "analysts" were more keen on defending our right to consume than to consider the possibility that the terrorists might have been attacking the undemocratic world polarized between 400 billionaires (according to The Economist) and 2.6 billion people living in poverty.

There have been notable exceptions to the drum majors for war. One is St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan, who seems to have re-discovered in this crisis the value of a skeptical attitude toward government claims, as well as the importance of rushing off to war. Far more typical of media analysis, however, was the response of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, the network's most watched pundit, who said on Sept. 17 that if the Afghan government did not turn over Osama bin Laden, "the U.S. should bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-- the airport, the power plants, their water facilities and the roads." As for the effect on Afghanistan's people, "Let them eat sand."

Fox, of course, is known for its extreme conservatism. The sentiment on other networks was usually not so extreme, but the difference seemed more in tone than in content. No one wanted to identify a possible motive other than envy. For example, in response to David Letterman's inquiry about motives for such hatred, Bryant Gumbel launched a lengthy homily on how the Third World is poor because they have failed to adopt our economic system and misplace blame for themselves upon us.

The entertainment industry has been recruited en masse to enlist in the propaganda effort. On the Sept. 18 "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno, the venerable pop protesters of the '60s, Crosby, Stills and Nash, virtually fell over themselves to endorse the hawkish sentiments of Senator John McCain, sitting on the couch nearby.

The next evening Leno treated his audience to Arnold Schwarzenegger literally wrapping himself in the flag and endorsing the coming war as though it were his latest action movie.

Closer to home, a national television audience on ESPN was treated to an emotional poem by Jack Buck that included the boast that the U.S. had never initiated a war, only finished them. Apparently Buck is unfamiliar with the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the American Indian Wars, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War.

On the positive side, journalists seemed to have learned something from the past.

In their initial reports most showed admirable restraint in assigning responsibility, avoiding the errors made in initially attributing the Oklahoma City attack to Islamic Fundamentalists. On Sept. 11, photojournalists risked their lives to bring us images of the terrible events as they unfolded. Their courage, not just new technologies, made the events immediate and gave them emotional impact.

Journalists and other parts of the media have encouraged citizens to adopt a broader understanding of Islam, not to assume that all Muslims believe "jihad" means they must make a "holy war" against Americans. Although anti-Arab sentiment is strong among the public, the media have followed the cue of political leaders in urging tolerance, in defining anti-Arab, racist attacks as "un-American," as another form of terrorism.

In the context of the coming "war," the unified response of political and media elites condemning anti-Muslim and anti-Middle Eastern prejudice makes sense. If America were to be visibly rounding up Arab and Muslim Americans, retaliation and extended military operations could hardly be sold abroad as a war for democracy--not to speak of the geopolitical impact of pissing off the governments who assure a steady supply of oil for "our way of life."

Certainty, criticism, censorship

Whereas wild statements like O'Reilly's that directly conflict with the Geneva Convention's outlawing starvation as a weapon of war draw no sanction, voices suggesting interpretations discordant with the official line are smothered. Bill Maher, host of ABC's "Politically Incorrect," found himself yanked off the air for saying on his first night back (Sept. 17) that long-distance Tomahawk missile attacks on buildings in Iraq during the Gulf War were more "cowardly" than the suicide missions undertaken by the terrorists.

Right-wing extremists jumped at any sign of pacifist leanings among journalists.

Peter Jennings received more than 10,000 angry calls for something he didn't say after Rush Limbaugh erroneously reported that "this fine son of Canada" had criticized President Bush for not returning directly to the White House after the attacks. Limbaugh continues to pollute the St. Louis airwaves after offering no more than a retraction, while Maher remained off the air at this writing.

Closer to home, Washington University closed a peace demonstration to reporters and other outsiders with the lame excuse of protecting the safety of its students. Do "patriotic" events on that campus merit the same treatment in deference to the safety of students of Middle Eastern origin?

The moral certainty of the American media is not shared by all journalists, not even those working for our closest ally. The Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz (Sept. 24) blasted Reuters for its refusal to label the attackers as "terrorists." Kurtz insisted that "a terrorist assault is what it is." A spokesperson for Reuters explained, "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist ... To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

Would that the American media were more willing to call a spade a spade when it come to America's own sponsors of terrorism. Instead, we are regularly treated to experts with far too much practical expertise in the field. A good example is ABC News analyst Vincent Cannistraro, who also shows up frequently in other media venues (NPR's "All Things Considered" on Sept. 26) as an expert on terrorism. Cannistraro's former employer was the Central Intelligence Agency where as a high-ranking official he was in charge of the arming and training the contras in Nicaragua during the early '80s.

In 1984, he moved to the National Security Council and became a supervisor of covert aid to Afghan guerrillas.

NPR and ABC like to tout Cannistraro's credentials as a former member of the NSC, but they never mention his direct involvement in training "terrorists"--first, contra soldiers who routinely killed Nicaraguan civilians, then mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden and the faction of the mujahideen that became the Taliban. The Afghan operation was part of CIA Director William Casey's plan in the early 1980s to raise and train an army of 35,000 Muslim fighters assembled from all over the Muslim world to train in Pakistan and fight the Soviet occupation of that country.

Cannistraro does discuss the origins of the Taliban and bin Laden's network in this struggle, but he never acknowledges his own role. Is it too much to ask that his experience organizing those suspected in the attack be revealed to the public?

News operations feel little need to balance their "expert" sources on war. Pacifica Radio correspondent Amy Goodman asked CNN's vice president of political coverage, Frank Sesno, "If you support the practice of putting ex-military men--generals--on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion during a time of war?" Sesno answered, "We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as advocates."

Those who see terrorism rooted in globalization are not necessarily peaceniks, though you would never know it from the media. In 1999. the U.S. intelligence community and state department advanced four scenarios for globalization in the near future. The most optimistic one, called "Inclusive Globalization," predicted that while "virtuous cycle develops among ... a majority of the world's people ... a minority of the world's people--in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Andean region--do not benefit from these positive changes, and international conflicts persist in and around those countries left behind." Of course, a majority, not a minority, of the world's people lives in these regions.

A war and coverage in the shadows

Coverage of wars since Vietnam leaves scant hope of critical coverage of the coming war in the shadows. In fact, one of the major contributory factors to the social and political chaos of the 1960s was the failure of mainstream media to look beneath official statements about the Vietnam War. These failures continued through the 1970s and '80s in Latin America as well as the Middle East.

Earlier this year it was revealed that the U.S. military's special Psychological Operations Group placed at least five of its personnel at CNN during the Kosovo crisis. Abe de Vries, the Dutch journalist who broke the story, confirmed it in an interview with Major Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information Service, who said, "Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program, 'Training with Industry' They worked as regular employees of CNN." CNN denies the Pentagon flacks worked on stories. Have they been redeployed today?

A local opportunity to ask some hard questions of officials who have supported terrorism will present itself when Henry Kissinger, who fled Paris earlier this year rather than face a magistrate's questioning about his involvement in Chilean deaths during "Operation Condor"--a CIA coordinated plan to kill thousands of dissidents in Chile and other South American countries after the Pinochet coup--speaks.

Will local reporters allow Kissinger to pontificate about the meaning of Sept. 11, without asking him about his role in Chile? When he talks about the Middle East, will anyone ask Mr. Kissinger about his 1997 recommendation that the U.S. and Israel crush the Palestinian intifada by responding "as quickly as possible--overwhelmingly, brutally and rapidly. The insurrection must be quelled immediately, and the first step should be to throw out television, a la South Africa. To be sure, there will be international criticism of the step, but it will dissipate in short order."

The media have shown little interest in such a historical memory. The day after the attacks of Sept. 11, the U.S. Senate confirmed as our ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, who was the US ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s.

During his tenure, Negroponte acted as virtual pro-consul in that country. He worked closely with Honduran generals persecuting leftists and human rights activists in their own country, and it was his responsibility to make sure that the contras, who were conducting terrorist raids on Nicaragua (then under Sandinista rule), were allowed to train and maintain bases on Honduran soil. Aside from some questions about whether he had lied about his role to Congress, neither the politicians nor the press had much interest in exploring his past involvement with terrorism.

Norman Solomon recently reminded us in his column "Media Beat" of Orwell's warning about propaganda in 1984.

"The process has to be conscious," says Orwell, "or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary."

To answer the question "why" it is necessary to rescue the uncomfortable facts from oblivion. That's why it might not be a bad idea for someone in the newsroom to find the widely available file tape of planes bombing the Mondea on Sept. 11. George Bush says there are 60 countries in the world that harbor terrorists. By my count there are at least 61.

Dan Hellinger is professor of political science at Webster University.