Ripples

Home

First Wave

Undertow

Reflections

Stepping Stones

Weblogs

Contributors

About Us

Archive

Innocent Ignorance: How the US Media Failed Us
By Andres Ortiz

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. ... The People cannot be safe without information." -Thomas Jefferson

In the weeks following September 11th's attacks on the United States, one question was asked repeatedly in the media and in our daily conversations: How could anyone hate us so much? The question betrayed the innocent ignorance of a society which has always felt and behaved somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. But the answer turned out to involve the actions and policies of our own government in the Middle East going back decades, shattering that isolationist illusion.

The real story, however, is not about our newly revealed history. The fact that the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan to a bloody civil war after ridding it of the Soviet threat, or that our push for peace between Israel and Palestine has been one-sided, was never really secret. The real story is that Americans were allowed to live in ignorance for so long. Now, say members of the New York University community, it's time for a change -- and they're pointing their fingers at the American news media.

A Significant Failure
"The reporting of international news has been quite poor in recent years, so it's not surprising that the public didn't understand these things, and it points to a significant failure on the part of the media," says Robert Manoff, director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at NYU. Adds Zachary Lockman, acting chair of the department of Middle Eastern Studies and professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, "If you read the British, French, or German press, you find a much wider range of opinion and a much deeper understanding of why there are a lot of people out there who have a lot of resentment towards the United States."

Understanding foreign events, especially when they involve the actions and policies of our own government, is more than just an intellectual conceit, it's vital to the functioning of our democracy. "One would hope that if there were a better understanding of how the world is perceived from these places," says Lockman, "Americans would ask why we're spending tens of billions of dollars propping up corrupt regimes when it conflicts with our own professed ideals about democracy and human rights."

Manoff is more cautious in his optimism. "I don't believe it's the case that if the American people fully understood this that they would give up their SUVs and their quality of life, so I'm not at all convinced that better news coverage would mean better policies, but at least it would mean that there's a possibility of better policies." That possibility is all the justification we should need to demand higher quality foreign coverage from our news sources.

In a democracy, common citizens are entrusted with the power to make decisions that affect the course of the entire nation. With regard to foreign policy, the decisions we've made have been uninformed, and the results have been disastrous. "What happened on September 11th is that disaster came home for the first time," says Lockman.

But it's not just voters who are being left in the dark. "It's very important to recognize that people in government, even though they have a lot of alternative and additional news sources, are very reliant upon the New York Times and the Washington Post for information," says Manoff. The result is that "policies can be created and pursued that are in fact ill-informed."

So what exactly are the problems confronting the American news media?

News as Entertainment
One issue which cannot be ignored is the simple fact that the mainstream media in this country are run for profit by large corporations. NBC is owned by General Electric, CBS by Westinghouse, and ABC by the Walt Disney Corporation, to name a few. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, says Mario Murillo, who teaches The Media in America in addition to producing and hosting his own show, Our Americas, on listener-supported radio station WBAI, "It's better to have it that way than to have the government control it."

But if in their quest for profits those corporations let business interests dictate the kind of journalism that they produce, then that is a problem. "[The media's] entertainment side has been stressed in recent years over its informative side, so we get a lot of mindless fluff," says Lockman. Closer to the matter at hand are what he describes succinctly as "massive cutbacks in foreign bureaus." Murillo explains that a major news source such as NBC might have no more than one or two correspondents covering an entire continent such as Africa or South America.

Related to the idea of profitability is the allegation that Americans just aren't interested in foreign news. "That's a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Manoff. "The less energy you spend writing and reporting foreign news in a way that's interesting to people, the more disinterested they become." Indeed, foreign news in this country is all too often presented as "news that doesn't affect us." The events of September 11th proved once and for all that this isn't the case.

But, given that most news organizations are for-profit businesses, what can be done to stop them from behaving as such? Information is the lifeblood of a democracy, and the organizations entrusted by the public with delivering the news must view their work with a sense of obligation, not simply as an opportunity to cash in. Still, it would probably take more than an appeal to their sense of journalistic pride to get them to ignore the bottom line. It has been encouraging to see the depth of reporting brought about by the current crisis but, says Manoff, "we can't afford to tune in and out this way. We have to stay tuned all the time, and journalists have to find a way to help the American people stay tuned."

Playing Catch-Up
Another issue that the U.S. news media must face is that even when foreign news is reported in the U.S., it's filtered through a U.S.-centric perspective. "This is natural," Murillo admits, "but when a crisis comes up, they have to make up for years of not reporting on alternative perspectives."

Most of the major news outlets have made some attempt to make up for that lost time. For example, many have brought in Middle Eastern analysts to explain the region, its culture, and politics. It's too little too late, says Manoff. "We can't call back the 5000 lives that were lost in the World Trade Center, or the catastrophic scale on which this crisis is playing out, or the further casualties to come in the war on terror, here and abroad."

And while alternative viewpoints are now being presented, little, if any, actual dissent is being allowed. "Nobody is criticizing the U.S. right now," Murillo says. "The role of a journalist is not to be a cheerleader of the state, it's to be critiquing and analyzing and asking questions."

"These are problems that existed even when the media covered the world more completely and more aggressively than it does now," says Manoff. "Journalism tends to define issues more or less the way governments define them, and that typically is a very narrow viewpoint that excludes a lot, overlooks a lot, and excuses a lot. Journalists need to learn to be much more intellectually independent."

This leads to the question of objectivity in the news. Before September 11th, the idea of a TV news anchorman editorializing in the middle of a broadcast would have been offensive to most viewers. Today, producers meekly defend their decisions to disallow reporters from displaying flags during a broadcast by saying it was done to protect those who "forget" to display a flag from being singled out as unpatriotic. There shouldn't be a need for excuses. A reporter displaying the U.S. flag during a regular news broadcast is like an umpire wearing a Yankees cap during a baseball game. Even a Yankees fan should be able to see what's wrong with that picture.

"There's a war culture that we're in now," explains Murillo "and it's going to get stronger. We're going to see a strengthening of that close-mindedness." But that's why it's more important than ever for journalists to maintain a clear head in everything that they do. There are accepted forums for editorializing in the media. Newspapers have op-ed columns, television has talk shows, ranging from the Rush Limbaugh Show to Rivera Live, where no one pretends to be objective. The regular nightly news broadcast, however, like the front page of the New York Times, is not the place to air opinions.

Solutions
Many more questions will be asked in the coming weeks. Most will be searching for short term fixes -- How do we make our airlines safer? How do we catch the terrorists? -- but long term problems must be addressed as well. There have been numerous calls for changes to U.S. policy in the Middle East. There needs to be a call for an equally important, and perhaps even more difficult, change: foreign news, especially when the U.S. government is involved, must be covered fully and fairly by our news media.

Murillo describes WBAI's ability to thoroughly cover world news on a shoestring budget as stemming from "a base-level commitment at the station to serving the communities that are concerned about those issues. In other words," he says, "we don't only deal with the crisis, we deal with it as an ongoing situation." The major news outlets need to learn from this example and cover world events on a sustained basis.

Another necessity, according to Manoff, is an increase in the level of sophistication of coverage. "This means that a lot of economic, political, social and cultural issues that aren't even on the media agenda now need to be on the agenda, and that reporters who cover these issues need to be better informed, and need to think in more complex terms, rather than reducing stories to black and white terms."

"Have people in these countries who speak the local languages, just to start," suggests Lockman, laughing at what should be an obvious idea. "It's a classic joke, if you know Arabic they'll send you to Colombia, and if you know Spanish you'll end up in Zimbabwe."

The changes that need to be made aren't simple, and they won't be cheap, but if you believe in a free press then you must believe that there is an obligation implied in such freedom. The news media in this country exist to serve the public, not to pander to it.

Have something to say? email the author

Contributors | About Us | Archive