How FOX News helped Romney lose

FOX News -- and the conservative commentariat more generally -- helped lose the election for Romney.

Others who assisted his defeat have already been identified (rightly) as "hardliners in the party" or more specifically "misogynist Republicans".

However, we should not forget the likes of FOX News and over-mediatized loony-right personalities who were on TV screens far more than anyone could have ever asked for during the last four years. In classic conflict media fashion, they took it on themselves to whip up the Republican base (in the process confusing it with the Tea Party) and keep them rabidly energized until polling day.

Why Uzbekistan Matters

The following article originally appear on CNN's Global Public Square on 18 October 2011.

=======

As Washington’s relations with Pakistan seem to hit a new low every week, the U.S. has been trying to compensate by improving ties with Uzbekistan to the north to shore up international efforts in Afghanistan. It is an understandable repositioning, but it is not one that will improve security prospects in the region.

Step by step, the U.S. has been increasing its reliance on Tashkent. Already the “Northern Distribution Network”, which relies in large part on overland links through Uzbekistan, delivers over 50% of NATO’s non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan, a number set to rise to 75% by he close of 2011. At the end of last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee helped deepen commitments by approving an Administration-backed measure to remove seven years of human rights-related restrictions barring military aid to Uzbekistan. And to just keep things running smoothly, President Obama personally phoned President Islam Karimov last week to congratulate him on his country’s 20th anniversary of independence.

Of course, no one is under any illusions about what kind of regime is fast becoming central to the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The State Department’s most recent Human Rights Report on Uzbekistan in April made it clear enough. It described the country as an “authoritarian state”, where torture is “routine”, freedom of speech and association are non-existent, independent political activity is impossible, and state-imposed “forced child labor in the cotton sector was widespread”.

The odious character of Karimov’s regime is clear, but, the reasoning goes, sometimes you have to hold your nose and deal with nasty dictatorships to achieve foreign policy objectives. NATO needs a supply route, and the fact that Uzbekistan literally boils its critics alive does not change geography.

Unfortunately, holding your nose in this case also seems to mean shutting your eyes - not just to the extreme abuses of the Uzbek regime but to what the security implications will be for U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the wider region.

A New American Reality

This piece originally appeared in openDemocracy on 5 September 2011.

=======

In September 2006, I wrote an article that sought to gauge the atmosphere in the United States five years after 9/11. At the time, I was struck by the way that a dark and destructive conflict mentality - something I had become accustomed to in places like Serbia and Kosovo during fourteen years’ away from the country of my birth - seemed to have become entrenched in American society.

“This is what wars do”, I wrote then. “(They) push people into mental corners, where us-and-them thinking works in two pernicious ways: it makes people unwilling to accept other points of view, and utterly blinkers them to facts that do not fit the prevailing group-think. The result is that the very ability to reason gets squeezed, sometimes until it disappears entirely.”

Five years on, it is clear that things have changed enormously in the second half of the post-9/11 decade. Life may not exactly be back to the way it was on 10 September 2001, but the all-consuming public dread of the next terrorist attack and the collective mindset of tribal defence, as well as the hugely counterproductive policy-making that went with that, have mostly dissipated. Put simply, the country has moved on.

With Media Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 10 September 2010, following a Florida-based pastor's threats to burn a copy of the Koran. The whole thing was a downward spiral of stupidity: the hateful ignorance of a book-burner, the lunacy of the world media for giving Terry Jones any attention at all, and then, six months later when the act finally happened, the mob violence that killed several UN workers in Afghanistan in some bizarrely conceived retaliation. Altogether, you might call it one of humanity's more embarrassing moments of recent years... But while you may not expect any different from religious extremists, it was the role of the world media that most shocked me. I received some criticism for attacking the media response like this, but I stand by the argument in full: news outlets have power and therefore responsibility.

=======

Looking at the dismal output of the international media in recent days, the only thing one can say is, shame on the lot of you.

The international media has elevated a non-entity lunatic to the heights of worldwide stardom in nanoseconds. Someone with a near-zero base of public support who wants to upset as many people as possible has been given multiple tribunes from which to incite hate and possibly violence.

Every even moderately sane public figure has spoken out against the preacher's intentions -- and with the media pushing the story at full bore, this has meant top-level political leaders, who presumably have better things to do, having to waste time damning the obviously damnable. Are they now expected to do this for every nutter who raises his head?

About the only public figures who didn't take this clear and sensible stand were the editors in newsrooms around the world. Why didn't they dismiss this story out of hand like most of the world managed to?

"But it was a story, so we had to cover it", will be the reply.

Nonsense. You made it a story.

US: No Satire, No News

This originally appeared on my Reuters AlerNet blog on 15 December 2007.

=======

Everyone who thought American television news couldn't get any worse has been proven wrong in recent weeks, as the writers' strike has shut down the satirical news shows where so many people get their news these days. Yes, it's not just drama and sit-coms that have been hit by industrial action by the Writers Guild of America, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Report" have also been in reruns since early November.

We're not talking about the loss of a couple comedy shows here. With the cliff-dive dumbing-down of US TV news over the last decade or so, these satirical news programs have become primary sources of information for millions of Americans in recent years -- particularly younger and more educated ones. The loss is felt, and there is a growing public debate about its impact on politics.

Useless Coverage of Summits

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 3 July 2007.

=======

The "lobster summit" between Bush and Putin reminds us all how bad the media are at setting their priorities.

It's not just this meeting of leaders, of course. Nearly all high-level summits are devoid of meaningful content, with no visible consequences for anyone anywhere.

Yet the world media love nothing more, giving commentators a handy hook to say what they were going to say anyway, and filling TV screens with images of the alpha males smiling jovially as they engage in a ritual dance to mark out territory.

Watching the media cover these summits, I am always reminded of "minister-meeting news",

US and Iraq: Post-Pottery Barn Rules

I posted this on my Reuters AlertNet blog on 17 March 2007.

=======

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s ominous pre-war warning, "You break it, you've bought it", set the tone for the public debate on Iraq for years to come. How ever bad Iraq got, the US would have to deal with it, because the American-led invasion had released numerous unforeseen, though hardly unforeseeable, consequences.

If last week's New York Times interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is any indication of where the American public debate stands today, and the new guiding principle really is, as she says, "the American people are done with Iraq", then the era of the "Pottery Barn rules" has given way to something much worse.

Al Jazeera International: The First Week

From my Reuters AlertNet blog, 22 November 2006. The station later settled on "Al Jazeera English" as its name.

=======

One week into Al Jazeera International's broadcasting, and I have to say: so far, so good. Expectations for the new English-language channel were high before its 15 November launch, but the station seems to be fulfilling its promise of attempting to reset the news agenda, including pushing more stories on previously under-reported crises. Of course, many people cannot receive the station through their cable provider yet, so for those who haven't been able to watch, here's some of what you missed.

The War in American Hearts and Minds

I wrote this for openDemocracy as part of their look at the legacy of 9/11 five years after. It was my effort to define how a "conflict mentality" had taken over the US in that period.

=======

Once you leave a place, it is never the same when you go back. I moved away from the United States fourteen years ago, and every time I return, I notice more and more changes in the country of my birth. Nothing peculiar in that, of course. I certainly never expected the United States to remain sealed in a pickle-jar marked "1992".

But the process has accelerated since 11 September 2001. Talking with some Americans these days, I am not really sure how much they recognise the scale of the sweeping transformation the country has been through over the past five years. Maybe it is just easier to see it when you don't live there and only visit every year or so. Daily incremental change is hard to spot, but small differences add up over time and become an unambiguous pattern.

My recurrent initial impression when returning to the US for a visit in the last five years is that the place has gone insane while I wasn't looking. It is a bit like visiting an old relative you haven't seen for a long time. You start off feeling she may be losing her faculties. Then you think she may in fact have been senile for longer than you realise. Finally, you begin to wonder if you ever really knew her in the first place.

After a few days of listening to Americans, however, I start to understand the madness and where it comes from. I have heard people talk like this and react like this before. In war zones.

The West Is Far Too Kind to Uzbekistan's Tyrant

This article originally appeared in the International Herald Tribune on 16 March 2004.

=======

"I didn't want to leave my home," a friend e-mailed me a few weeks ago, "but Uzbekistan doesn't give me a choice."

After the police got rough and threatened to arrest him, he decided it would be best to leave the country right away. Given that torture by the law enforcement agencies in Uzbekistan is "systematic" - to borrow a word from the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Theo van Boven - my friend, a journalist who had tried to investigate police abuses for an international news agency, was wise to get out while he could.

Kind treatment, however, has been the approach of the international community toward the Uzbek regime.

May We Have Independent Journalism Back Now, Please?

The Poynter Institute asked me to write a sweeping assessment of U.S. journalism in the wake of 9/11, so I gave them this, which they ran at Poynter.org on 14 January 2002. It drew a lot of fire, but sadly the "conflict mentality" the country was living in remained for years to come. I only realised in 2011 that the piece was included in Terrorism and 9-11: A McGraw-Hill Resource for Students, Teachers, and Writers.

=======

America is four months into this crisis, and one comment about the course of events is now long overdue: the U.S. media have woefully mishandled their coverage of post-Sept. 11 developments. The way the mainstream U.S. media have allowed themselves to become the government's mouthpiece is not only a blot on the record of American journalism, it is a great disservice to the American public. In the end, the media's blind obedience damages the very democracy they apparently wish to serve and defend.

What has happened is not an unusual phenomenon; it is common for patriotic fervor to distort good editorial sense during wartime. But the sooner media professionals jump off the bandwagon and get back to doing their jobs independently, the better off society will be.

With so much space devoted to flag waving and hero worship, the media have given little attention to the deterioration of civil liberties and the abandonment of the American legal system's once high standards. The media announce Bush's new military courts and Ashcroft's sweeping arrests, but they do not offer up much analysis or criticism of the extensive, extra-Constitutional powers these new courts will have, and it took ages for the media to realize that many of those (presumed innocent) detainees from the

Ashcroft raids have languished in custody for months -- London's Indepedent reported that at least one has died in custody -- without access to a lawyer or visits from family.

Instead, as though we were all living in some bizarre parallel universe, some in the U.S. media have actually debated the advantages of using torture on detainees. As if, now that the barbaric Taliban is wiped out, the U.S. has to make up for the consequent decline in medieval justice in this world by fostering it at home.

While it's OK to discuss torture, it is definitely not OK to ask questions about the Administration's handling of this war. We see very few questions about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, for example. Perhaps most alarmingly from the U.S. perspective, however, is that no one seems to be asking why U.S. tax dollars are still funding an unreformed CIA, the agency that arguably should have prevented Sept. 11 in the first place and, even more worryingly, is ostensibly protecting America from the next Sept. 11.

Forget big questions, though, the U.S. media can't even ask where the nation's top elected official was on that fateful day and why. At least two journalists who criticized Bush for his Sept. 11 Nebraska side-trip have been fired for their opinions. (See "Columnists Fired After Criticizing Bush" in Editor & Publisher, 9/27/01.)

Chillingly, the words of the great media chiefs have re-enforced the blindly patriotic approach of their writers and editors.

CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson sent a memo to his staff asking them to downplay Afghan civilian casualties, saying it was "perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and demanding that when viewers see civilian suffering in Afghanistan, "it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States." That is, take sides, and bury bad news.

Along with Isaacson's remark, CBS News icon Dan Rather's comment on David Letterman's show in September has to be one of the most frightening things anyone so senior in news production has ever said in the history of American journalism: "George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions and, just as one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

In many instances the mainstream media noted these incidents, but few have found them disturbing, and the only deep discussion of them has sadly been limited to publications that can be quickly dismissed by mainstream pundits as "alternative," "leftist" or, worst of all, "foreign." Thus, major U.S. media outlets quickly forget about them, and no widespread public debate has ensued.

In normal times, of course, such statements would be considered shocking and scandalous, a matter for widespread professional disapproval and even calls for resignations, but nothing like this has happened. With the mantra of the last four months being "nothing will ever be the same," otherwise independent and experienced journalists seem to accept such abnormality precisely because these are not "normal times."

Americans are generally too shocked and too horrified to make sense of the situation, and U.S. journalists are so overwhelmed by Sept. 11 that they've thrown out their old, reliable moral compass and sense of professional ethics. Everything's changed, so anything goes.

To get a more realistic view of the U.S. media's temporary insanity, it helps to step outside the institution and talk to media experts in other parts of the world, those who have been watching events and media developments in the U.S. but who are not part of the U.S. media establishment.

For Hugo Young, a senior political columnist at The Guardian in the UK, the problem is evident at one of the very cornerstones of modern journalism, the press conference. He gave me his view of one of Bush's recent press conferences in Crawford Tx., saying it provides a good example of what is currently wrong with the U.S. media.

"Not a single one of the journalists present -- the top White House press corps, I presume -- dared to ask him the only question that really matters now: namely, what are your intentions, Mr. President, as regards Somalia, Sudan and Iraq? Obviously he would have ducked it. But the mode of ducking would have been of the highest interest."

Young justly labels such behavior "totally sycophantic" and wonders why the reporters failed to understand their role, "at least to some degree, as representing the public interest in getting big questions answered."

The recent British and U.S. coverage of the Qalaye Niazi attack at the end of December is telling. I was on BBC World Service the other night talking about exactly this difference in reporting -- the civilian deaths at Niazi are open knowledge here in London, and it's discussed in the media quite widely, even a week after the event. The U.S. media seemed not to pay it much attention, following the Pentagon line given by the official on the BBC just before me: "No investigation is necessary." (The Defense Department only grudgingly admitted that an investigation may be necessary after the United Nations tallied scores of civilian casualties.) Just compare headlines from January 1, 2002: The New York Times put the info in an interview with Hamid Karzai entitled: "Afghan Leader Warily Backs U.S. Bombing" The Washington Post: "Afghans, U.S. Officials At Odds Over Airstrike" The Guardian: "U.S. accused of killing over 100 villagers in air strike" The Independent: "U.S. accused of killing 100 civilians in Afghan bombing raid" The Times of London: "100 villagers killed in U.S. airstrike"

Dusan Reljic, Senior Researcher at the European Institute for the Media and author of Killing Screens: Media in Times of Conflict, voiced similar concerns to me regarding press conferences. Though Reljic is quick to note some good reporting by U.S. correspondents on the ground during the Kosovo crisis and the NATO bombing of Serbia, the U.S. media's approach to U.S. government press conferences was disheartening, then as now, when U.S. military action abroad is concerned.

"The problem begins already when U.S. journalists call the press officers by their first names and ask: 'What is OUR point of view on...' When I was editor of [Yugoslav news agency] Tanjug, I would severely criticize any colleague who would, at any moment, even when putting questions to an official, use 'we' instead of the proper, neutral form: 'What is the government's opinion on...'"

The "we" language reveals the problem in an instant: American journalists now consider themselves Americans first and journalists second, and the U.S. media thus take an uncritical approach toward U.S. government action, allowing themselves to become an arm of government policy. Media professionals can easily justify their actions: after all, "we" are all on the same side now, aren't "we." Under the slogan of unity, "we" can forget the public is being short-changed and made ignorant by the resulting dearth of information and lack of wide-ranging public debate, now considered divisive and unhelpful to the national effort.

Phillip Knightley, the Australian-born UK journalist and author of The First Casualty, widely acknowledged as the quintessential book on war reporting, told me how he thought this willing abandonment of independence came about as a result of a misinterpretation of the current crisis.

"It seems that anything a government does in a war of national survival can be justified including insisting that the media get on side," Knightley noted. "But this isn't a war of national survival, so one would expect the media to adopt its usual questioning, critical dissenting approach (as in Vietnam). It hasn't. Instead journalists have been cowed into silence. Criticism, debate, etc. equals dissent equals lack of patriotism and being soft on terrorism. Anyone who tries to disagree is shouted down."

The real origin of the problem seems to reside exactly here: this is not a war of national survival. The country has been attacked, it has suffered a previously unimaginable horror and to make matters worse, the economy is in recession (which would have happened without Sept. 11). The overall shock has been too great and has led people to assume that the very country itself could disappear at any moment.

But the United States is not about to be wiped off the map. Not even close.

To say people are "over-reacting" would be crass and insulting. It is simply the case that with no precedent whatsoever to guide them, Americans just do not know how to react at all. As this is seen as the worst thing that ever happened, American journalists are assuming it is the worst thing that could ever happen, and they are acting accordingly.

Paul Eedle of Out There News, a UK-based online news organization working for diversity in world news reporting, finds this response natural, yet still dangerous.

"It's entirely understandable that U.S. media coverage of America's conflict with Osama bin Laden has been largely uncritical of the Bush administration," Eedle told me. "The attacks on Sept. 11 were the most serious attack on innocent American civilians in the country's history. It's natural for the media in a shocked, grief-stricken country to rally behind its government's powerful and apparently successful war strategy."

But at the same time, Eedle notes, "The lack of diversity in U.S. media coverage is worrying because it means there is no real debate over the exact nature of the threats that America faces and the most effective way of eliminating them."

Without strong and free public debate, there is no way for society to answer today's most important questions, including critical questions of national security. Eedle points to the Mid-East as a worrying example of what the U.S. could become.

Without a strong, open debate on how best to guarantee the long-term security, Eedle warns, "America risks ending up like Israel - with overwhelming military superiority over its enemies but unable to stop a handful of determined people from inflicting terrible suffering on its citizens."

"That debate," Eedle rightly says, "needs to start in the media."

The self-shackled U.S. media clearly prohibit such debates, but the situation is not completely hopeless. Knightley's reminder about the real nature and scope of the current conflict gives us some reason for optimism. Once American journalists realize that the end of the world is not as nigh as they thought, criticism and public debate should return.

The sooner, the better, of course, because as "natural" as it is for wartime media to rally round a flag, the longer it goes on, the longer key public debates are ignored and the greater the risk to traditional values such as freedom of expression, that guarantee of a well-informed public so essential for democracy.

Sept. 11 may well have brought about the end of American innocence. It may also have brought about the end of isolationism as a political force. But what it should not do is end America's tradition of critical and independent media.