Bull's-eye

The first question at a recent Town Hall Meeting on the University of Colorado campus was, "Are the news media in America equipped to cover a war shaped by race, culture and religion? If not, why not?"
Not "If so, why?" The spin set the standard for two hours of media-bashing.

The meeting was titled, "Race, Religion & The Media In the Crossfire of Crisis." The moderator asked academics from the religious studies and ethnic studies departments, an Islamic spiritual leader, the female president of the Muslim Students Association, and two journalists, including me, to be panelists. The audience was mostly draft-age students, with a few Vietnam-era professors and community members mixed in.

Even as I accepted the invitation, I knew the journalists would be in the bull's-eye. In the first week after the terrorism attacks, a Pew Research Center poll found that "an unprecedented 89%" of Americans gave the news media a positive rating. On that awful Sept. 11, when President George W. Bush was flying from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska before finally returning to the White House, it was television news that held us all together, linked us to a communal living room and provided a comforting sense of familiarity and authority.

Six weeks later, civilized discourse is again degenerating into polarized viewpoints. Hard-liners are belittling moderates, nuance is out, pedantic is in -- "You're either for us or agin' us!"

Why is the media's credibility gap growing again? Renewed sensationalism, a tendency to get too "up close and personal" into victims' suffering and shallow reporting contribute. The flip side is critical reporting of the Bush administration's efforts at tightening civil liberties, where exactly the billions in relief efforts are going, and analysis of military operations that some consumers see as endangering our troops abroad.

During the Town Hall meeting, the Islamic cleric stated unequivocally, with great passion, that the "press has not and will not and is not capable of telling the truth." The ethnic studies professor and the young female president of the Muslim Students Association seconded him.
Critics rightly noted that until the terrorism attacks on New York and Washington, most mainstream news outlets barely paid lip service to international reporting with almost no in-depth coverage of different cultures, particularly in the Muslim world. I agreed that the Media, capital M, increasingly has blurred the ethical line between entertainment and enlightenment. On Sept. 10, shark attacks, Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez' wedding got a lot more attention than the Taliban.

Why? Ratings, stockholder revenues and focus groups were part of the answer. Reader and viewer apathy, corporate consolidation of news outlets into a handful of media conglomerates, and less discriminating audiences as well as journalists also contributed. But democracy's citizens have ample opportunities to keep themselves informed.

Breaking my rule of never trying to justify other journalists' actions, I cited a dozen sources besides MTV and the major networks where citizens could find divergent views about Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and why some Muslims hate America. Wearing his black baseball cap backwards and prominently displaying his gold chains over his black T-shirt, a young man dismissed me as being "elitist" when I said that books, periodicals, newspapers and the Internet were readily available for free at public libraries.
"Poor people don't have time to go there," he said.
The media remains an easy target for Americans who still can't get a handle on this devastating blow to our national psyche. We don't know who to count on and we can't see an enemy plainly enough beyond "The Evil One," as Bush calls Osama bin Laden. Most of us worry that we'll never feel safe in America again. When the "greatest generation" fought the Nazis the picture was focused, the goals directed and the process articulated. America had to reclaim lost territory, rescue imprisoned peoples, punish those responsible - "make the world safe again." 
Many consumers claim the media is scaring the nation by reporting on a possible bio-terrorism threat and the anthrax attacks. Most of those have been diagnosed among journalists, giving that old saying "kill the messenger" a new -- and dangerous -- meaning.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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