Two Allies, Two Realities

It's fair to expect that the current US attacks upon Afghanistan (it's hard to call it a "war" until anyone is shooting back) are going to be reported differently in, say, Pakistan, than they are in the United States. Americans seeking out additional information look at such sources specifically because their reporters are closer to the action, more familiar with the culture and history, and more attuned to the implications of what's taking place.

But a far more telling measure of just how corrupt and obsequious major US media have become is through comparisons with similar reports in Britain--the trusted ally and relentless cheerleader for the US, a country with its own sordid record in fighting terrorism, the only country presently fighting alongside America. Last Wednesday. Oct. 31, was a particularly telling, and galling, example of how little Americans are actually being told about this conflict.

Consider two newspapers: the New York Times, widely considered this country's newspaper of record (and one of the only newspapers in the country that even tries to take international reporting seriously); and The Guardian, a somewhat left-leaning daily that is one of several British papers to feature solid, comprehensive reporting on recent events.

Here are the war-related stories on the Guardian's website from Wednesday:

Confusion over war's next phase: US "desperate" over next move; Military warns of real problems / Al-Qaida is winning war, allies warned / Bombing concern around the world / US "must increase its role overseas" / US advisers join assault on city.

In addition to these stories, the Guardian also had a blurb on the warning of an imminent terror attack issued Tuesday by the White House:

New terror warning bewilders America: World latest: White House officials found themselves on the defensive yesterday after Americans reacted more with bemusement than alarm to the administration's warning to be on heightened alert.

On the same day that the Guardian had a half dozen articles on the war or opinions of it -- several of them reporting on criticisms of the war effort--the Times, our paper of record, gave us two articles:

Special forces, on the ground, aid the rebels: "supply routes, improve communications, and target the Taliban"; and a sub-article on Afghanistan as a possible Vietnam-style quagmire

Note that in the Guardian headline, US advisers "join [the] assault"; in the Times, they "aid the rebels."

The Times also had a noticeably different spin on the alert:

"Alert said to be tied in part to monitoring of Al Qaeda"

As it turns out, the headline was inaccurate; it refers to a Thomas Ridge statement that the alert "stemmed in part from information related to" Al-Qaeda or bin Laden, and did not say how that information was obtained. The 30-paragraph story mentioned nothing of bewilderment or bemusement; it focused on a White House claim of "credible sources" as justifying the vague alert, including an interception of "a coded message from an associate of Osama bin Laden." In passing, the authors noted in paragraph 11 that some law enforcement officials were "confused and frustrated." Government sources were quoted exclusively, until one quote from a Chicago cop in the very last paragraph.

This sort of exercise makes tedious column reading, I'm sure, but it's an instructive, and revealing, process to go through on any given day. Beyond the sheer amount of information missing from the Times, the skepticism voiced by the Guardian articles is hardly exclusive to the Guardian; on the same day in the Daily Telegraph, Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith wrote an opinion piece blasting the war effort and America's apparent lack of a military strategy.

Meanwhile, on the same day in the US, it's an almost certain bet that no television network and no more than a half dozen newspapers, anywhere in the country, had coverage that even equalled (let alone exceeded) the "comprehensiveness" of our paper of record. That's in a country of 280 million people.

In media around the world, important questions are being rasied about this war--regarding military strategy, lack of progress, lack of relevance to thwarting terrorism, Islamic public opinion, and the pending humanitarian disaster, among other things. They're being raised even more strongly in Europe and especially in the Third World than in Britain. In the United States, where our media certainly has access to at least as much of this information, these discussions are strikingly absent--or if they appear, as they did Thursday in the Times, it's as a report on the existence of foreign criticisms, not to analyze them or (heaven forbid) suggest any domestic US discontent.

The truism of media literacy is that the real political bias of American media is neither fully liberal nor conservative; it is a bias in favor of power. Sadly, disgustingly, we are seeing perhaps the most important and repellent example of that behavior in memory. The biggest story in at least a generation is being subjected, in the name of "freedom," to an Orwellian censorship that would make Pravda or the Xinhua News Agency blush.

At a time when our government is making critical decisions that will affect the course of the world--and is, by most world estimates, making them rather badly--the American public, which has both a right to know what our leaders are doing and a right to tell them if we agree, is being carefully shielded from that process. We don't know the options, we don't know the decisions, and when we do know the decisions, we don't know the consequences, or the next options. Our media is supposed to serve democracy--not prevent it.