U.S. media struggles to educate angry public

Harry Bhaskara, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, Washington D.C.

Anyone watching television programs on the major channels here during the weeks after Sept. 11 attacks on the United States is likely to be uninterested.

Except for a few must-see programs such as baseball matches, television stations have, as expected, mostly focused on Sept. 11: the U.S-led bombing of Afghanistan, anthrax scares, bioterrorism and airport security.

"Ratings are everything for local television stations," an Indonesian journalist in New York said. "Once a new topic comes up the television will dump the previous topic."

A New York resident said: "No one knows when the saturation point will be reached."

This seems to be the nature of American media; focusing on one big news item for days, may be months, only to abandon it completely when a substitute news item presents itself.

Some residents complain about "oldies" in television broadcasts -- a repetition of what has been reported in the day before with incremental additions of the latest development.

Newspapers which satisfy readers here are those meeting the need for more in-depth information, the bigger picture behind a given story. A quick look at newspaper articles, however, revealed that the question of "why" the U.S. became the target of the attacks was rarely addressed.

This seems to relate to the way most Americans place undue emphasis on their own country, as reflected in the media; although Sept. 11 is indeed under the international spotlight.

Fierce competition among media outlets may explain the jump from one topic to another in rapid succession.

A journalism expert at the University of California in Berkeley says that the American media is driven by market forces.

"We hang on good journalism by the little finger," says Orville Schell, the university's journalism graduate school dean.

The media is always looking for news items that are receptive to viewers or readers. A senior editor for a weekly news magazine says: "When we publish stories about an event in a foreign country, the response is not very good."

People prefer stories about what is happening in the United States and those with deep American involvement. Though this principle of "proximity" is similar to other countries, in the longer term, this would increase the gap between what is happening in a given country with what is being reported or broadcast in the media -- particularly on sensitive issues such as the bombing of Afghanistan.

There are concerns that the coverage is dictated by the market more than journalism principles or conception.

In times of crisis such as in the aftermath of Sept. 11, signs are that the U.S. government is becoming more touchy. For media people, the classic question of defending one country's interest versus the journalism norm of reporting the facts has came to the fore and is haunting American reporters.

A Washington-based journalist of the Reuters news agency said that he had ruffled feathers with people in the defense department when he dispatched a report on an unusual gathering of top officials at the Pentagon one Sunday morning, only hours before the U.S.-led bombing on Afghanistan.

Although the news agency did not get into trouble he knew that such reporting was unwelcomed by the authorities.

The credo of free press is being tested in this war.

An editor of a leading news magazine says individual reporters and editors are using their own judgment in reporting sensitive issues.

"It is the first time I remember that we weigh information against its news sensitiveness like the location of chemical plants and military bases," he says.

In the past, he says, the magazine was in total liberty at publishing this kind of information.

The Voice of America (VOA) also came under fire when it ran an interview with Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist accused of directing the Sept. 11 attacks.

VOA escaped from troubles but sources said the government might likely substitute the head of the radio station quietly in due time.

"You have people who don't want to hear other people's opinions, for example, bin Laden's opinion," Schell said.

But he is more worried about the influence of industries in the media.

"I am weary about government censorship but I am more weary about market censorship because it is more subtle," says Schell.

U.S. media fails, he says, because of market forces.

"They don't rely on principles or conception, a concept of educating the people about the outside world," Schell says.

The writer was a participant of the recent Fall 2001 Thomas Jefferson program of the Honolulu-based East-West Center.