Has terrorism changed journalism? Panelists blast acquiescent press

By Andrew Kosow

The chairman of Pakistan Press International told New England journalists that he has been quite surprised by the dearth of criticism in the American media for anything President George W. Bush has done.

"The level of pluralism and diversity in the Pakistani media is much more than in America," despite U.S. stereotypes to the contrary, contended Owais Aslam Ali, who is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University for the 2001-2002 academic year.

He joined U.S. counterparts in questioning the relative docility of the U.S. media in the face of restrictions on press gathering during the Bush-declared war on terrorism.

Bill Ketter, a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and now a professor at Boston University, moderated the panel discussion at the recent annual meeting of the New England Newspaper Association addressing this question: "Freedom of the Press: Has Terrorism Changed Journalism?"

Bob Zelnick, a former ABC-News Pentagon correspondent who succeeded Ketter as chairman of BU‚s Journalism Department; Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for The Boston Globe; Robert Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and fomer chairman of the Freedom Forum, and Ali took turns excoriating both the performance of the news media in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist acts and the Bush Administration‚s attempts at censorship and prior restraint.

The Bush Administration is asking the press to cooperate with favorable coverage about the war on terror and the media have meekly acquiesced, his American counterparts on the panel agreed, as did many of the news professionals in the audience at the Omni Parker House Hotel.

Jim Rousmaniere, the newly elected president of NENA, said the panel was "excellent" and its message important. "It is good to remember that we are not part of the team and that we need to stay independent."

Carol Rose, a former journalist with UPI and now an attorney with Hill & Barlow of Boston, opened the discussion with a "quick and dirty" history of Afghanistan including a slide show of photographs from her time covering the Soviet invasion in 1989. She talked about her experiences in Afghanistan, peppering grim statistics about death and starvation with anecdotes about individuals who suffered from either Soviet or Taliban violence.

Rose saluted journalists covering the current conflict in Afghanistan, saying she understood the dangers they face. Despite the threat of kidnapping and extortion from Afghan militias and the lack of cooperation from the U.S. military, reporters and photographers are getting the story out, she said.

Jon Kellogg, the editor of the Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American said the history lesson was thorough and helpful "for journalists that might not be on top of their game."

Giles, like Ketter a longtime daily newspaper editor, said that the American public is not being well enough informed about the war in Afghanistan, because the U.S. government is not granting journalists access to the information or the battlefield due to the experience with the press in Vietnam.

"Most top officials in the Department of Defense were active in the Vietnam War and believe that our setback in that war was due to journalists having a free run of the war zone," Giles said.

Zelnick, a former ABC Pentagon and foreign correspondent, contrasted the good relationship the military had with the press in World War II with the adversarial relationship today. "The integrity of the press used to be important to the military and that is not the case anymore," Zelnick said.

He agreed with Giles that "there is a residual bitterness of officers who grew up in Vietnam," but the military still has an obligation to grant access to the press. "The military needs to plan for the press coverage when they are planning the military operation," Zelnick said. It shouldn't come as an afterthought or a reason reporters can't go.

He dismisses the claim by the military that they can't protect journalists in Afghanistan by angrily noting, "we already know it's dangerous. That's why we are going in there."

Karen Testa, news editor of the Associated Press in Boston, said that the many examples given by Zelnick of the deteriorating relationship between the press and the military were illuminating. Jurkowitz said the media are censoring themselves, decrying the "collective attitude" of the television executives who unanimously acceded to the request by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice to screen video of statements by Osama Bin Laden before putting it on the air because there might be hidden messages.

"This kind of group think in the media is rare, to say the least," Jurkowitz said. He conceded that the media is in a difficult situation because there is enormous public pressure in favor of President Bush's war on terrorism. He cited a Pew Foundation poll that showed the public believes 2 to 1 that the Pentagon should control the flow of the news, not the media.

"Never mind an adversarial media," Jurkowitz concluded. "There is little appetite for a probing media today."

Rousmaniere asked the panelists why editors were bowing to this pressure.

"Lack of confidence," said Jurkowitz, Many journalists, like Steve Costello, vice president of the Sun-Journal in Lewiston, Maine, said that Ali was the most informative of the panelists. "I wasn't shocked by what he said but I was surprised by his comments about how people really feel about us."

Jim Campanini, the editor of The Lowell Sun, lamented that there was not enough time to discuss examples of the press acting despicably like the article that criticized Daniel Pearl's wife for being on television too much.

But all of those interviewed agreed with the sentiments expressed by Thomas Jefferson about the critical role of a free and responsible press, in this quote Ketter read: "The basis of our government being the opinion of an informed people and the very first objective should be to keep that right."