-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4313759,00.html
}}}>Begin
Los Angeles dispatch
Where no news is good news
Censorship and partisan coverage of events in Afghanistan are not
causing concern to a US public unused to complicated stories about
the world beyond America's shores, writes Duncan Campbell
Duncan Campbell
Wednesday December 5, 2001
The Guardian
A poll conducted last week in the United States by the Pew Research
Centre for the People and the Press found that 80% of people felt
that censorship of the news from Afghanistan was a "good idea".
The unanimously supportive coverage given to the war by all the main news media in the
US has also won approval, with 69% saying that the news media "stand up for America",
compared with 43% who thought that they did so b
efore the attacks.
But does the supportive coverage come with drawbacks?
"Ask anybody who only watches CNN and network news how many civilians have been killed
and I don't think anyone knows that," said Stephen Rohde, the president of the
California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union
at a debate on private rights versus public security last week.
He said that he felt that the media was now an area of American life that has been
affected on the civil liberty front by the war.
Every country in times of crisis or war can generally rely on a supportive media - as
happened in the United Kingdom during the "Gotcha!" phase of the Falklands War - but a
growing number of American commentators are expr
essing disquiet at what they feel is a lack of information which the media may deem in
some way harmful or unpatriotic.
After the Bush administration requested that interviews of Osama bin Laden not be
shown in full, all of the mainstream media abided by the request. Some news services
go further.
Fox News Channel, the conservative channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, makes no pretence
at objectivity in its coverage.
One of its news anchors, Brit Hume, told the New York Times that the network did not
give too much weight to reports about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and said to
NYT reporter Jim Rutenberg: "War is hell, people di
e. We know we're at war. The fact that some people are dying, is that really news? And
is it news to be treated in a semi-straight-faced way? I think not."
Leslie Bennetts, writing in the current edition of Vanity Fair, says that "Americans
like a simple storyline that makes it easy to decide who the good guys are and who the
bad guys are and the byzantine tangle of internat
ional politics, Islamic fundamentalism and American foreign policy is making many
citizens unused to grappling with such headache-inducing complexities want to throw up
their hands."
Bennetts suggests that "American newspapers and television companies have reduced
their foreign coverage by 70 to 80% during the last 15 to 20 years in response to
corporate demands for profits."
Consequently, the public is unaware of much of what is happening elsewhere in the
world.
My local radio "news" station promises that if "you give us 22 minutes ...we'll give
you the world" yet I have often listened for the 22 minutes planning to count the
number of countries outside the US deemed worthy of a
mention and found none.
Just after reading Bennetts' article, I happened to be at the screening at the
University of Southern California in LA of a documentary, War and Peace, made by the
prize-winning Indian film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, whose
work I have known for nearly 20 years.
The film was about nuclear weapons, focusing on the race between India and Pakistan to
enter the field.
The film itself is a tour de force, beautifully shot and often darkly funny and much
more riveting than the dry subject matter might suggest.
It went down very well with the audience of mainly young South Asian Americans, as
people of Indian origin are called in the US.
Patwardhan's work used to appear regularly on Channel 4 in the UK back in the 1980s
and since this is his best to date one might imagine that either Channel 4 or the BBC
would snap it up.
Not so. Both have turned him down. Like many other documentary-makers
on both sides of the Atlantic, he is discovering that there is little
interest in screening films about complex subjects in foreign
countries.
Which is a pity because it seems as though complex subjects in
foreign countries are what we are all going to have to learn about
for a long time to come.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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