Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Dec 28 2001 (IPS) — The suicide commandos that attacked New York and Washington on Sep 11 not only destroyed two of the most outstanding symbols of the United States, but sparked a chain reaction that also brought several “myths” of journalism tumbling down.

“Comment is free but facts are sacred.” This editorial maxim that has served as a cornerstone of the Anglo-Saxon model of journalism and its expansion throughout Latin America was, perhaps, the first victim in the US media of Operation Enduring Freedom, Washington’s military response to the terror attacks.

On Oct 10, the six leading TV networks in the United States became cogs in the war against Afghanistan, which had been declared three days earlier, when they agreed not to broadcast the messages of Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden, accused by the government of George W. Bush of staging the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

While the US networks renounced freedom of speech, the satellite TV station Al Jazeera in the tradition-bound, monarchic Qatar gradually gained legitimacy as the most reliable source of information on the conflict in Afghanistan.

On Dec 26, Al Jazeera, which is viewed throughout the Arab world, ended the year with a broadcast of a new videotaped message from Bin Laden, while the whereabouts and the fate of the notorious leader of the Al-Qaeda network remained unknown.

Loathed in the West and venerated by Islamic fundamentalists, Bin Laden was, without a doubt, the star of newscasts around the world in the last few months of the year.

However, leading US news magazines like Time and Newsweek were forced to turn their backs on the most basic and essential standards of journalism, and refrain from recognising Bin Laden as the “personage of the year” in their year-end reviews.

Instead, they granted that honour to New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his work in clearing the rubble in Manhattan and restoring the city’s calm and pride that were damaged by the terrorist attacks.

Giuliani and Bush thus took their places at the head of the list of “American heroes”, due to the labour of media converted into a sounding board for a collective sentiment created by the US political class.

“It isn’t patriotism, but jingoism that the press in the United States has demonstrated since Sep 11,” wrote Chilean reporter Ximena Torres Cautivo in the local magazine El Sábado.

Torres Cautivo pointed to the lack of an in-depth analysis in the United States on the attacks and the war against Afghanistan, as well as the reprisals taken by the public and advertisers, who silenced the few dissident voices in the press.

In the view of many reporters and analysts, the position taken by the US media in the latest armed conflict crystallized a trend towards a rolling back of freedom of information and independence of the press, which had been manifested most clearly during the Vietnam war (1965-75) and the Watergate scandal in 1974.

The 1991 Gulf War in which a US-led multinational military alliance attacked Iraq revealed new methods of control by the military command over access by journalists to conflict zones, according to Chilean defence analyst and war correspondent Raúl Sohr.

That new model of war coverage, which turned the airstrikes on Iraq into a kind of video game without casualties, injuries or blood seen in the images broadcast by the US Cable News Network (CNN), was reproduced in the US media coverage of the bombing of Afghanistan.

The US media have largely shown an aseptic conflict, with no tragic images of the people mutilated by the bombs dropped on Afghanistan along with little yellow packages of food.

Cable TV subscribers in Latin America noted the contrast between the coverage provided by CNN, whose special correspondents celebrated the military advance of the opposition Northern Alliance as the Taleban regime fell back, and that of Spain’s Televisión Española, which mainly followed the humanitarian drama of the refugees along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Armando Silva, a professor of semiology at the National University of Colombia, told the Argentine news agency Telam that the United States had imposed its guidelines for journalistic coverage from its position as a “country at war” that had set out to win back its “virility and dignity” in Afghanistan.

Silva said the US thus imposed an “extremely oversimplified concept” based on a division of the world into “the good guys and the bad guys,” which has led, among other consequences, “to a ban on the airing of images of the suffering of the Afghan people.”

The press in the United States submitted to the government’s censorship for a number of reasons, in which “morality, political expediency, convictions, reasons of state, and above all, a sense of opportunity” all came together, said Raúl Trejo Delarbre, with the Institute of Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The debate on coverage of the war on Afghanistan also highlighted, once again, the dependence of the media in Latin America, especially TV, on the major international networks – and particularly CNN.

Patricia Tellez, a professor in the communications department of the Javeriana University in Colombia, told IPS that TV stations in her country “lined up behind the CNN version. The newscasts merely broadcast the images, with little or no analysis or reflection.”

The Sep 11 attacks will go down in history not only as a terrible tragedy, but also as a major media event, with millions of viewers worldwide watching live footage of the plane that smashed into the second Twin Tower of the World Trade Center, when it was not yet clear whether the crash against the first Tower was an accident.

Perhaps that was the element that had the biggest impact in triggering the war-time journalistic strategy assumed by the Bush administration, which claimed freedom of speech and freedom of information among the victims of 2001.