News media get 'B' for coverage of war on terrorism
By Natalie Cortes
freedomforum.org
11.21.01
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ARLINGTON, Va. — Osama bin Laden’s access to nuclear material and weaponry should be better investigated by the U.S. news media, according to Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“We have to let the American public know what the threats are,” Cirincione said Nov. 11 at the Newseum. “There’s been very little on the accessibility to some of the tons of material and weapons that are located in the states of the former Soviet Union, very close to Afghanistan.”
Lori Robertson, managing editor of American Journalism Review, also said the news media could have done a better job reporting the anthrax cases.
“There’s a degree of responsibility in the anthrax reporting to not make people unduly afraid,” she said. "People will get unduly afraid no matter what you do, but I saw … few articles that addressed well how afraid should we really be.”
Robertson criticized news organizations for practicing ‘gotcha journalism’ after the attacks. She cited a story aired on a Nashville television station. “A reporter crawled under the fence of a water treatment plant to show people how easy it would be for terrorists to break into the water-treatment plant and poison the city’s water supply, but he had messed up and broken into the sewage treatment plant. … That kind of reporting cannot serve a good purpose,” she said.
But Joyce Davis, deputy foreign editor at the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers, said such practices could not be found at her bureau. “We actually have very serious discussions among many editors about ... what should we put out there,” she said. “There’s been a lot of speculation that our papers have not printed.”
Overall, the panelists gave the news media a “B” for their coverage of terrorism in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One of the biggest hurdles for the media was due to the decline in international news coverage over the last 10 years.
“Many of these people, the American public didn’t know about before Sept. 11, but the journalists … weren’t experts on these issues either, so we’re having to rush to learn, to know and have the resources to really cover it properly,” Davis said.
Another challenge has been the lack of information from the Pentagon on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. However, there have been cases where news organizations have been privy to certain information and decided not to report it. When special forces were first deployed on the ground, Knight Ridder held the story.
“One of our editors … said, that’s one story we don’t need to be first on,” Davis said. “We felt that we did not want to print any information [that would] risk … one soldier (who might be) killed because we put something in the paper,” Davis said.
The panelists also talked about international resentment toward the United States and its policies in the Middle East.
Cirincione partly blamed the press for the ill will. “Resentment started to creep in as [people in other countries] increasingly saw the media operating … as a propaganda unit for the United States and presenting things that they were seeing on the ground in their region of the world very differently from how the media was treating it,” he said.
For example, he said that some news agencies had downplayed Afghan casualties. “We place more emphasis on Americans dying, understandably, but because we don’t talk enough about the casualties in Afghanistan, we underestimate the reaction of the rest of the world to what we’re doing.”
The panelists disagreed over cable news networks’ decision to stop airing pre-recorded statements made by bin Laden. “It’s always a good idea to review material before you put it on the air,” Robertson said. “(But) I’m not so sure the government made a good case that there [were] any kind of signals or reason not to show these Osama bin Laden tapes.”
Cirincione applauded news organizations for erring on the side of caution. “Even if there’s a chance that this is happening, the responsible thing to do is to turn off his communication ability with the cells that he has in the United States and in Europe.”
Looking ahead, the panelists said the news media should focus on “more coverage on the Middle East and the Islamic world, and how what happens there affects us, and also how this war is going to affect us,” Robertson said.
Cirincione said the emphasis should be on the cost of the war in Afghanistan and of improving security in the United States. “This is a two-front war that we’re fighting. One is Central Asia, and the other is in the offices and airports and mailrooms of America.
“Some of the reporting has been excellent on the vulnerabilities we have here. I think that is something America is increasingly concerned about. It is going to cost billions to defend America in the way that it now has to be defended,” he said.
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