Media Fundamentalists: Biased reporting on Islam

The Western media still looks at the complexities of Islamism with one dimensional, black-or-white reporting. Farhan Haq of Inter Press Service reports.

NEW YORK: Austrian scholar Karl Kraus may have put it best: "How is the world ruled and led into war? Diplomats lie to journalists, and believe those lies when they see them in print."

The most telling example of Kraus's dictum today may be the U.S. media's coverage of radical Islamist movements. A year ago, many leading U.S leading U.S. newspapers darkly predicted Islamist seizures of power across North Africa. Today, they claim the war against Islamists is won.

Throughout, the media has both followed and encouraged the government's efforts to portray the Middle East's political crises in the framework of a war against radical Islam.

The only issue is how best that war can be won. There is no real dissent over whether a war is being fought.

In June, a U.S. press tour of Algeria, where a secular dictatorship has fought radical Islamists to a standoff for three and a half years, contributed to that impression.

The various journals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek magazine, all claimed the Islamists' war was winding down. Despite the high level of killings, they agreed, normalcy was returning to Algerians' daily life.

The vast majority of U.S. media and journalists share the view that Islamist forces need to be contained, excluded or directly combatted.

In an recent lengthy analysis, for example, Washington Post writer Daniel Pipes, a frequently quoted observer of Islam, argued that the widely held belief that conditions of poverty breed fundamentalist militancy was wrong.

"Foreign aid clearly cannot be the outside world's main tool to combat fundamentalism," he wrote. "Those intent on stopping the fundamentalists wave, whether Muslim or not, should confront fundamentalists head-on."

Among the means to be used are "breaking up gangs, stopping the flow of money from abroad, retaliating when they harm us," said Pipes. "Only in this way will the scourge of fundamentalist violence be stopped."

In an editorial titled How to Stop Militant Islam, Middle East analyst Michael Fields of The New York Times argued for a different approach.

He sees the creation of new Middle Eastern democracies which would combat Islamism and "also help create more humane, even more efficient, Arab governments that would be favorably disposed toward the United States."

But Fields' recipe for the United States to bolster Middle East "democracy" is not to allow free elections for all parties, but tightly-controlled arrangements that exclude Islamists.

The war against Islamism, however, must continue even in this formula. Fields says he bases his "sanguine, secular view" of the future for Arab democracies because "it is difficult to see how Islamist parties might come to power."

"The route of elections is barred by most of the semi- democratic countries -- including Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco -- which ban political parties based on language, region or religion," he notes approvingly. And Algeria, he adds, banned Islamists when they seemed certain to win power in 1992.

"Abrogating democracy is the new strategy," says Jeff Cohen, executive director of the New York-based media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

The press, he says, has always followed the State Department's thinking that pro-U.S. authoritarians sometimes need to be supported instead of democracy. FAIR studies show consistent press support for de facto one-party rule in Mexico, he argues, or in the past for crackdowns on leftist or Communist movements.

"This is not a new thing, but a new wrinkle on an old thing," Cohen says. "The new dread is Islamic fundamentalists."

Ironically, this comes at time when, as Professor Greg Gause of Colombia University notes, the United States is trying to be portrayed as "not the bad guy" in the Algerian Islamists' eyes.

Gause says Washington has sought to appear at least even- handed in its criticisms of both the Islamists and the military- backed Lamine Zeroual government, so that it can avoid outright hostility with the Islamists if they gain power.

"They're trying to avoid the mistakes of Iran," Gause said of the hostility between that nation and the United States ever since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's forces overthrew the U.S- backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi.

But Cohen warns that Karl Kraus's dictum should be borne in mind. The media is taking a hard line on Islamism, he argues, because their sources in government confide in them that such a line is needed. And the diplomats in turn believe in the need for a hard line when they see the editorials calling for one.

So, ironically, the U.S. media covers every Algerian killing, or the recent assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in terms of near-war. But the Bill Clinton administration, for now, has kept its door half-open to the Islamist opposition in both countries.

Still, that may change if the pro-U.S. North African states continue to be in crisis. "I suspect the State Department isn't really neutral," Cohen says.

For now, if the media believes the Islamist threat is weakening, news coverage may lighten up somewhat. But Cohen says it will remain just as biased, and just as warlike toward Islamic popular movements.

The next assassination attempt will get huge coverage," he says. "But day-to-day repression won't."

-- IPS