By Thalif Deen
Dawn
International journalists ponder their role and responsibility in covering conflict, whether in Afghanistan or the Middle East. US media - and television in particular - came in for a drubbing at a recent seminar here on "News vs Propaganda: The Gatekeeper's Dilemma."
Mathatha Tsedu, deputy chief of news at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), said that the strength of CNN was its ability to bring events to the world in a timely manner but expressed "terrible disappointment" that CNN had agreed with the US administration not to air a taped message from Osama bin Laden.
Using the administration's declaration of a "war against terrorism", Tsedu asked: "A war involves two sides. If the world could hear what President George W. Bush and Pentagon officials had to say, why could it not hear Osama? And why were announcements made by the Pentagon considered facts?"
He also argued that media have yet to fulfill a crucial role in helping change what he perceived as the mindset of the average US citizen, namely that every Muslim is an Osama. "It is not just writing a single story. It warrants a complete reassessment of how the media covers people and regions," Tsedu said.
Hafez al-Mirazi, Washington bureau chief of the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network, said that US reporters and news anchors increasingly were wrapping themselves with the US flag in a public display of undisguised patriotism.
As an example of the blurring of the thin line dividing coverage from collaboration, al-Mirazi highlighted the case of Geraldo Rivera, a talk show host dispatched to Afghanistan as a war correspondent. Last week, Rivera admitted he was roaming the war-ravaged country armed with a pistol. He said that although he carried the weapon for self-protection, he would not hesitate to shoot Osama if he encountered the fugitive in "enemy territory".
Addressing the Middle East conflict, Steven Williams, senior editor of the BBC, said that although many US media outlets were what might be considered good, about 90 per cent appeared to offer a saccharine-coated version of events that is, by and large, aligned with the Israeli camp.
"I think, therefore, the American public is being ill-served. The BBC offered a different perspective and we have had a fantastic response in the US, perhaps because people were seeing the story in a different way for the first time. We are far from being perfect but we have been extraordinarily blunt," he added.
Opponents of the war in Afghanistan also are being kept out of most TV talk shows. On one rare occasion when anti-war activists appeared, on a "Nightline" news programme aired nation-wide last month, viewers were cautioned in advance. "Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages," Nightline host Ted Koppel told viewers in a preamble to the nightly broadcast.
No bold solutions to age-old problems of media coverage emerged from the seminar but participants did enjoy the odd, albeit painful, quip. Some US news networks have used the term "our planes" so often, said one participant, that viewers may have got the mistaken impression that targets in Afghanistan were being bombed not by the US military, but by US TV networks that had deployed their own warplanes.
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