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Coverage of Terrorism
Murrey Marder: When we began
this particular project no one, especially
me, could have anticipated where
it would be right now after September
11. Many news people, including me,
initially leaped to the metaphor of the
Pearl Harbor attack. But the more I
thought about the shocking effect, for
me it had more of a combination of
Pearl Harbor and Sputnik. I don’t know
if many of you can remember Sputnik—the
Soviet satellite launched in
October 1957—but this had profound
impact on the American psyche. For
the first time the threat was directly
overhead, and a foreign power had
invaded American air space, in a degree
unlike Pearl Harbor, which struck
the fringes of American power. Sputnik
was right above us, beeping tauntingly,
mocking American boasts of scientific
primacy.
The impact was profound. It overwhelmed
so many concepts of American
education, especially the scientific
concepts, because at that time the Soviet
Union was vastly underrated as a
quite backward power. Instead, it had
penetrated the shield of American invincibility
in a way much like the attacks
in September penetrated the
shield of our homeland invincibility.
But there the comparisons end.
There was nothing mysterious about
Sputnik’s origin or purpose. It was a
calculated psychological and technological
shock in an escalating cold war
between two superpowers armed with
obliterating weapons. Yet Sputnik cost
no casualties, destroyed no facilities,
and left no nuclear, biological or chemical
aftershocks.
By contrast, Americans on September
11 were not only aghast over the
nature and magnitude of the terrorist
attacks, but they were confounded by
the enmity of an adversary they did not
know. American bewilderment was
exemplified by the outcry, “Why do
they hate us?”
Where were the watchdogs who
could have sounded that alarm? Any
attentive reporter working in the
Middle East during the last decade
could not have missed hearing what
one U.S. diplomat recently described
as “a sorcerer’s brew of anti-U.S. grievances.”
Grievance news, however, was
little sought and rarely headlined by
most American news outlets and least
of all by commercial television.
Grievances, in the absence of a major,
imminent threat to the United
States, were rated as dull, tedious and
intolerably space consuming. At the
same time, the end of the cold war
supplied a convenient excuse for reducing
the total space given to foreign
news. Consequently, the number of
American reporters based abroad
shrunk steadily in the last dozen to 15
years, drastically diminishing overseas
news coverage.
So as the grievances intensified, the
watchdogs decreased, because the
American corporate focus shifted to
the bottom line. The bottom line was
profit and loss. I would suggest that the
American conglomerates are looking
at the wrong bottom line. The bottom
line, now we realize, is not profit and
loss, the bottom line now is survival,
and that is why the threat is so stark.
The question now is what do we do
about it journalistically, and here we
face a formidable challenge. Those of
us who live in Washington, work in
Washington or New York, might have a
more acute sensitivity of what we’re
going to be up against in trying to
penetrate a situation which threatens
the nation in many ways, in which the
administration has declared that it is
going to rely heavily on secrecy. And
we really haven’t faced that kind of a
direct challenge at the outset of a crisis
in the lifetime of any of us.
This administration, unfortunately
for us, has a great deal of practice in the
use of secrecy. Many of its officials
conducted the Persian Gulf War in exceptional
secrecy and tied the press
into knots as a result.
We are going to have to learn a great
many things to cope with the new secrecy.
I would think that we’re going to
have to go back to basic principles, and
when we are foreclosed, as we often
are likely to be, from the American
version of what is happening around
the world, we now have greater access
than we ever had before to the outside
world’s interpretation of what is happening.
So there is going to be a different
kind of competition for the eyes
and ears of the American public, and
we’re going to have to listen to that
very carefully.
At some point, our business is going
to have to invest far more resources
than it is committed to doing now, if it
is going to be in a position to keep the
American public even modestly informed
about the outside world. I am
personally appalled by the fact that the
administration’s initial quest for legislation
to give it authority in this crisis
went virtually unchallenged. It got blanket
authority. In my time, we used to
kick ourselves over the blank check
that the Johnson administration got in
the Vietnam War in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The blank check the executive
branch holds now is the greatest blank
check any of us have ever seen because
it has absolutely no limitations on it. If
any part of the press was courageous
about questioning the authority, it has
escaped the attention of most of us.
There are things that others can do,
too. Harvard can raise the level of education
of its students and the rest of us
about what is happening in the world
around us. We clearly do not know
enough about other religions, other
cultures, other histories. We’re going
to have to awaken ourselves, to a tremendous
degree, about the fact that
our fate can be determined considerably
by others, as we have seen. At the
time of Pearl Harbor it was determined
in Japan. At the time of Sputnik it was
being determined in the Soviet Union.
Here it is being determined in Central
Asia. It is just impossible to survive in
the modern world very long in an island
of privilege surrounded by a sea of
have-nots. We’re going to have to learn
much more about the embittered havenots
of the world and how their fate
can impinge on ours.
With that over-long dissertation, I
then invite you to help us all learn
collectively how we can better inform
ourselves and our readers and viewers
about our responsibilities in meeting
what is certainly not going to be a
short-term problem, but very likely the
largest one we may see in our lifetime.
Thank you. ■
38 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001