Media in terror, David Elstein

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

For some people, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were nothing less than an assault on western-style democracy. Paradoxically, this interpretation of 9/11 has triggered a set of responses that are seen by many defenders of civil liberties as a more serious threat to democracy than those posed by the terrorists as such. Broadcasters and newspapers have found themselves in the firing line as both sides in this debate look to the media to defend their position.

One reason why the position of the media is so fragile is that western governments performed a sharp about-turn after 9/11. Until that date, there was little desire to recognise, let alone propagate, the notion that attacks on western targets – bases, embassies, military assets – were being mounted in a coordinated fashion, inspired by a particular hostile source.

There were understandable reasons for this. Governments dislike implying that events are outside their control. They equally dislike acknowledging that such attacks might be a response to western policies, rather than random acts of violence or symptoms of a struggle for power in the less civilised world.

In that context, the media were encouraged to regard terrorist incidents as localised not globalised, internecine rather than international, and beyond any rational means of response. Negotiating with terrorists was out of the question: by their nature they either have no coherent political demands, or demands that are beyond the democratic pale.

After 9/11, the posture of the United States in particular (and the United Kingdom to a lesser extent) shifted dramatically. “Terror” was elevated to a status that demanded warlike responses and wartime extensions of government powers. That this also suited the Russian government, facing a still unquelled revolt in Chechnya, made the initial attack on Afghanistan relatively straightforward. To begin with, the media response was largely supportive.

When faced with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) insurgency in the 1970s and 1980s, UK governments were wont to attack the media for attempting to discuss the “aims” of those labelled terrorist, on the grounds that those capable of performing dastardly acts against the civilian population should not be granted what one minister called the “oxygen of publicity”. Similarly, any serious questioning of the state’s conduct of the anti-IRA campaign was stigmatised as treachery.

An International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security will be held on 8-11 March 2005, sponsored by the Club de Madrid and the Varsavsky Foundation. In advance of the summit, a new openDemocracy debate – introduced by Chloe Davies, and involving Karin von Hippel, Mary Kaldor, Roger Scruton, Fares Braizat, Charles Peña, Fred Halliday, and John Hulsman – explores how best democratic states and citizens can respond to terrorism.

To find out more about the Madrid summit visit safe-democracy.org, register to receive information here – and add your own views to a developing dialogue!

In the wake of the Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974, the UK parliament rushed through the Prevention of Terrorism Act (introduced as a temporary measure, it was regularly renewed in subsequent years with minimal debate). It curtailed the rights of those arrested on terrorist charges, and led to a spectacular series of miscarriages of justice, some not corrected for nearly two decades, and then only after persistent media pressure.

Today, in both the US and the UK, we see similar responses to shattering events. The campaign in Afghanistan was accompanied by a tightening of civil liberties domestically. Democracy, we were told, had to defend itself. So the state strengthened its powers of surveillance, arrest, detention and secrecy. To begin with, recoiling in horror at unspeakable sights, the media gave politicians the benefit of the doubt. The slogan “War On Terror” was integrated into TV news bulletins, on the BBC as much as on Fox News. Protecting ancient freedoms at home seemed quaint when we were told that sarin factories, terrorist cells and extreme Islamists threatened massive casualties, if not our very way of life.

Unsure of the facts themselves, conscious that politicians were striking a public chord with their warlike utterances, many print and broadcast outlets decided to take confidential briefings at face value. Scarcely a single newspaper or TV channel challenged the steady stream of assertions that Iraq constituted a threat to the US and the UK, let alone to the middle east (and most ignored the Israeli chief of staff, Moshe Yaalaon’s cheerful confession that he lost no sleep over Iraq, despite its close proximity). The story of Iraq seeking yellowcake from Niger was taken seriously by some publications long after its inherent improbability was evident.

When the BBC – weeks after the Iraq invasion – raised doubts about the integrity of a government dossier issued six months before the invasion, it was subjected to a campaign of ministerial vilification beyond anything it had previously experienced in nearly eighty years of journalistic output.

Having persuaded the great majority of media representatives to accept embedded status during the Iraq campaign, senior US army officers have now questioned whether the media are undermining the post-war military activity with open reporting.

From the other end of the spectrum, critics of the media have catalogued the errors of omission and commission perpetrated by some of our most respected news providers in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Some of the offenders have apologised whilst others have responded by trying to balance reports echoing the government line with others challenging the underlying assumptions of the entire “war on terror”.

Thus the BBC can transmit a scary drama documentary about the dangers of a dirty nuclear bomb, and then show a documentary series – The Power Of Nightmares, directed by Adam Curtis – exposing (amongst other things) the inability of a dirty bomb to kill anyone, let alone whole populations.

openDemocracy’s “Journalism & War” debate examines the tensions between governments and media produced by the Iraq war, including articles by David Elstein:

“Caught in the crossfire: broadcasting in wartime” (June 2003)
“Hutton and the BBC” (January 2004)

If you find our work on this topic valuable, please consider subscribing to openDemocracy for just £25 / $40 / 40. You’ll gain access to easy-to-read PDFs of all our material.

Yet the Curtis thesis – that the cohesive nature of al-Qaida has been much exaggerated, as has the internal threat in both the UK and the US – is itself challenged by the horrific attack on Madrid in March 2004. The media continue, in the light of such events, to report repeated statements by those in authority that further outrages are inevitable.

This in turn creates a climate in which further erosion of civil liberties – exemplified by the announcement of plans for permanent incarceration of the Guantánamo detainees, without trial – can proceed. It is left to the judiciary – the US Supreme Court, the House of Lords judicial panel in the UK – to impose limits on such expansion of executive power. Eight out of nine of the Lords judges pronounced the UK’s indefinite detention without trial of foreign suspects as a greater threat to liberty than the terrorism it purported to deter.

Unlike the judiciary, the media remain uncertain of their role. Still caught up in the emotional responses to 9/11, Bali and Madrid, they for the most part remain unwilling to confront the executive’s desire to expand its power – and some newspaper editorials even endorse that desire. Yet democracy – and justice – has never been in greater need of its traditional defence by free media. The reluctance of the media to adopt that role, in the face of a tide of public opinion carefully steered by political leaders, is part of the damage that the terrorist attacks have inflicted on us all.

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Media in terror, David Elstein