Gagging media the US way

The censorship during the US-led Gulf War against Iraq was so severe that, at times, it was reduced to the point of sheer lunacy.

When a newsreporter at a press briefing asked if General Norman Schwarzkopf, the burly commander of the Gulf War, weighed 250 pounds, a US official would only say: "General Schwarzkopf is a big man, but regulations prohibit the disclosure of his weight."

Clearly, even Schwarzkopf's rotund physique was a militarily sensitive issue— something that could have inspired a Marx Brothers comedy. The most blatant examples of military censorship came out of the Gulf War where the Pentagon laid down the rules of journalistic engagement.

Walter Cronkite, a former TV anchorman and an icon in American journalism, complained that the American people, whose sons and daughters fought that war and whose money financed it, were denied the information to which they were entitled to by the military's restrictive policies.

Cronkite said that Pentagon policies severely restricted the right of reporters and photographers to accompany US troops into action, as had been permitted in all other previous wars. "This denial prevented the American people from getting an impartial report on the war," he said.

In one of the most eloquent publications on the subject titled "Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media", Martin Lee and Norman Solomon say that the vast majority of news accounts during the Gulf War were drawn directly from what American officials spoon-fed journalists.

Press censorship, the book says, had less to do with protecting US troops than with projecting the right image so that Americans back home would provide political support for the war. The American news media have now been called upon to draw the line on the rocky terrain in Afghanistan as to where journalistic objectivity ends and full-blooded patriotism begins.

The month-old war against Afghanistan has brought into the open all the sensitive issues of media coverage— Pentagon manipulation of the news media, self-imposed censorship by flag-waving reporters and publishers, and suppression of dissenting voices.

As the US continues bombarding Afghanistan, the need for journalistic objectivity is being increasingly overshadowed by a sense of patriotism among reporters and TV anchorpersons.

The mainstream media in the US have already blacklisted Indian novelist Arundhati Roy who has written some riveting anti-American pieces on the futility of the war in Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, she has found a prominent place in British and European newspapers which are being described as more objective than the American news media.

The opponents of the war are also being kept out of most TV talk shows. But even if anti-war activists do appear, viewers are being cautioned in advance, as ABC's Ted Koppel did in his "Nightline" programme: "Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen," he said, in a preamble to the programme. "But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages."

Comparing British and American newsreports on the war, the New York Times said last week that the "soft" American and the "stern" British tone was typical of the reports. "And the difference highlights the value of seeing the world from a broader perspective."

"If a priority of America's war on terror is holding a global coalition together," said Caryn James of the New York Times, "it helps to know, without sugar-coating, what the rest of the globe is thinking."

The spin doctors at the Pentagon and the White House have been putting out exhilarating reports on the war while the Taliban in Kabul is giving out its own biased versions.

Last week, Walter Isaacson, chairman of CNN, sent a memo to his foreign correspondents urging them to redouble their efforts "to make sure we do not seem to be simply reporting from their (Taliban's) vantage or perspective."I saacson said images of civilian devastation in Afghan cities should be "balanced" with reminders that Taliban harbours murderous terrorists.

When the US networks last month carried a taped message from Osama bin Laden— American's most wanted man— the White House was very unhappy with it even though it was first aired in the Qatar-based Arabic language satellite channel Al-Jazeera.

Pointing out that bin Laden may be using these statements to send hidden messages to his followers, the White House appealed to the American news media to use restraint in publicising the Saudi dissident holed up in a cave in Afghanistan. Since then, the major TV networks have shut him out. In their daily news reporting, some of the major US networks have used the term "OUR planes" so often, that some viewers have got the mistaken impression that bin Laden's caves are being bombed not by the US military, but by American tv networks deploying their own fighter planes.