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By Ammu Joseph
Journalism After September 11 reflects the problems and perils of patriotic journalism, not just in the US but across the world
'Journalism After September 11'
Edited by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen With a foreword by Victor Navasky Routledge
(Taylor & Francis Group), London and New York, 2002 (distributed in India and Sri Lanka by Roli Books)
268 pages, Rs 495.00
 Reading Journalism After September 11 while watching journalism during the war on Iraq has been a surreal experience. The book, a collection of essays and papers analysing different aspects of media practice in the period after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, renews hopes for American journalism. Media coverage of what is variously known as the invasion of Iraq or the liberation of Iraq, depending on who is talking, revives fears for journalism everywhere in times of war and terror.
The book, with its detailed and critical examination of media responses to the events of that historic day and their aftermath, holds up a mirror to journalists, reflecting in particular the problems and perils of patriotic journalism. It appears, however, that not many journalists are looking into that mirror, judging by the coverage of 'Showdown: Iraq', certainly on mainstream American television.
 Indeed, patriotic journalism seems to have progressed or, rather, regressed into what is now being described - often in glowing terms -- as 'embedded journalism'. This new genre of what passes as journalism is the outcome of recent efforts by the United States of America's Department of Defence, a k a. the Pentagon, to facilitate media coverage of the war by training journalists, assigning them to different sections of the armed forces, and enabling them to travel with the troops and report live from various battle-fronts.
The question of how credible such reports can be, when the journalists concerned are almost literally in bed with the soldiers, was the focus of some discussion on the US-based, hard-hitting alternative radio show, Democracy Now! on March 21, two days into the attacks on Iraq. As one commentator put it, with such correspondents increasingly being identified by television anchors in terms of the regiment in which they are 'embedded', it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the person facing the camera is a military spokesperson or a journalist.
For those in the media interested in learning important professional lessons from recent history, and for those outside the media keen to improve their understanding of how the media shape public opinion and policy, Journalism After September 11 is a must-read. As Victor Navasky, Publisher and Editorial Director of The Nation magazine, puts it in his foreword, "…journalism, the flow of news, information, and ideas, is the circulation system of our democracy, the way we find out what's what. It is based largely on journalism that we make up our national mind."
The focus of the book is primarily on the coverage of 9/11 and subsequent events in the American and, to a lesser extent, British media, and it offers a predominantly Anglo-American view of this coverage. Most of the contributors, including the editors, are academics attached to schools of journalism and communication or departments of cultural or media studies in universities, mainly in the USA, although four are based in the United Kingdom, two in Australia, and one in Canada.
However, the thought-provoking questions raised in many of the essays can be readily applied to the media elsewhere, including India. As Navasky says, "Although many of the examples here are site-specific, the issues raised cross geographic, cultural and political boundaries."
For instance, post-9/11 patriotic journalism in the US was and is different mainly in scale, style and intensity from the nationalistic journalism witnessed in India after the mystifying attacks, allegedly by terrorists, on Parliament House in New Delhi in December 2001 and Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar in September 2002, not to mention the infamous near-war with Pakistan over the peaks of Kargil a few years earlier. Similarly, issues concerning media ownership, convergence and consolidation, the resulting market-orientation of the media, and the effects of these realities on the practice of journalism are becoming increasingly relevant in India.
In fact, books like Journalism After September 11, and some of its illustrious predecessors (most of them also relating mainly to Western media), underscore the urgent need for more regular, systematic and rigorous analyses of the Indian media, especially during crises of various kinds, of which there is no dearth in the country.
Edited by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen, the book covers a wide range of media issues through essays organised under four heads: The trauma of September 11, News and its contexts, The changing boundaries of journalism, and Reporting trauma tomorrow.
The issue of trauma - as experienced by citizens as well as journalists -- which underlies the essays in the first and fourth sections, is a new contribution to analyses of journalism and the media. The rationale for adding this dimension to media studies is explained by the editors in their introduction: "In pondering journalism's imperatives following the events that rattled the world, the book's contributors consider the emergent capacity of those invested with helping to give the events voice. At the heart of the discussion is a notion not previously addressed in scholarship on journalism, namely that of trauma… it is our belief that journalists and news organisations covering the events of September 11 were wounded too… To consider (the) impact (of trauma) on the news media, as engendered by the events of September 11, is tantamount to glimpsing into journalism's future. For it may be that we have entered a new period in which journalism in its recognisable form has changed, a period in which trauma and its aftermath will continue to constitute a key factor in shaping the news."
While the varied and imaginative approaches through which a number of essays tackle this issue made them interesting enough, they did not engage me as much as those in the second and third sections did. One reason may be the apparently implicit assumption that this was the first time journalists had experienced trauma (defined as "a wide range of cognitive-emotional states caused by suffering and existential pain") in the course of doing their jobs. For journalists in many parts of the world, including India, who have lived through and covered major natural and man-made disasters, or widespread and brutal communal (sectarian) and ethnic violence, not to mention different types of armed conflict, trauma is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps some acknowledgement of this reality and a more sensitive, inclusive understanding of diverse experiences of trauma as experienced by journalists across the globe would have made the discussion on trauma here appear less like self-absorbed navel-gazing.
On the other hand, it could be that I found the essays in Part 2 most absorbing because the issues they raised dovetailed with my own preoccupations vis-a-vis the media: the links between journalism and the social, cultural, economic and political contexts in which it functions.
In his essay, 'American journalism on, before and after September 11', James W Carey, CBS Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University, New York, offers a fascinating historical overview to explain journalism's coverage of 9/11 and the developments thereafter, highlighting the fact that it had much to do with "the damage done to democratic political institutions during the 15-year vacation journalists took from politics, rationality, and the public sphere." There are many lessons here for journalists everywhere concerned about the dumbing down of the media, the rise of celebrity and lifestyle journalism at the cost of serious coverage of critical issues, and related matters.
Robert W McChesney, Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in his essay titled 'September 11 and the structural limitations of US Journalism', suggests that the American news media's coverage of the political crisis following 9/11 was exceptionally problematic from a democratic perspective. According to him, the basic reason for the poor coverage was the code of so-called professional journalism, which tends to give "official sources" considerable influence over what was covered and how it was covered. Again, this is an issue that is relevant to journalism everywhere and needs to be more widely debated by media professionals across the world.
The third essay in this section, by Karim M Karim, Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Caleton University, Ottawa, ought to be required reading for journalists in India and other parts of the world where 'Muslim' has virtually come to mean 'terrorist'. Titled, 'Making sense of the "Islamic Peril": Journalism as cultural practice', it argues that reporting on 9/11 and its aftermath fit into the cultural frames that have long been in place to cover violence, terrorism and Islam. According to Karim, "Recognising the fundamentally cultural nature of journalism enables journalists to uncover and utilise the cultural tools of understanding that make possible genuine insight into human nature. The rupture resulting from the events of September 11 presents a longer-term opportunity for turning towards more authentic coverage of the world."
The essays in Part 3 are particularly interesting because they look at "some of the forms and practices existing at the margins rather than the centres of journalism." In his essay, 'Reweaving the Internet: Online news of September 11', Stuart Allan identifies several issues concerning online reporting of the day's tragic events. In 'Taking it personally: Supermarket tabloids after September 11', S Elisabeth Bird examines the newfound relevance of tabloids in the landscape of post-9/11 journalism. While she focuses on American tabloids, Michael Bromley and Stephen Cushion include both broadsheets and tabloids in their analysis of 'Media fundamentalism: The immediate response of the UK national press to September 11'. Simon Cottle's 'Television agora and agoraphobia post-September 11', which examines the role of British current affairs programmes in facilitating and containing public debate and deliberation surrounding the events of 9/11 and their aftermath, is not only fascinating in itself but useful for a more informed viewing of current affairs programming on Indian television, especially popular shows on satellite news channels.
Conspicuous by its absence even in this section is any discussion of post-9/11 coverage of minority media in the US -- for instance the African American press. From what I heard from African Americans I met in early-2002, their community had quite a different and more complex take on the terrorist attacks, the patriotic fervour it generated, as well as the hate crimes against other minority populations that it led to. It would have been interesting to find out whether these privately expressed views were reflected in the media reaching out to the community.
The essay, 'Journalism, Risk and Patriotism' by Silvio Waisbord in Part 4 has an illuminating account of media coverage of the anthrax scare that followed the September 11 attacks, providing convincing arguments about why the panic-mongering media coverage of the early days subsided once it began to appear that the terrorist, in this case, was home-grown. According to him, once official sources seemed to lean towards the hypothesis that domestic perpetrators were behind the attacks, "The media could no longer render an account that fitted, in Michel Foucault's sense, the 'regime of truth' in place since September 11. At a time when patriotism was still pervasive, indications that fellow members of the nation apparently sent anthrax-laced letters flew in the face of the 'united we stand' patriotism that the media helped to perpetuate." Could a similar phenomenon be in operation in the apparent lack of interest in probing the continuing mystery of the murderous arson in Godhra last year?
Journalism After September 11 certainly raises many important questions regarding what journalism can and should look like. As Phillip Knightley, author of The First Casualty, has put it on the back cover, "This is not a book just for journalists but for everyone concerned about democracy, freedom of speech and our future."
(Ammu Joseph writes on women's issues and media studies. Her latest book on the media is Women in Journalism: Making News, Konark, 2000.)
InfoChange News & Features, March 2003
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