BEIRUT: Have you ever wondered how the United States of America, with its high rate of literacy, with its millions of university graduates, with its much-vaunted “Freedom of the Press”, could produce so many citizens with so little real understanding of the world around them?
With so little concern for the flesh-and-blood consequences of their government’s foreign policy.
After all, we are not talking about a nation removed from the international community and we are also not talking about a closed society, but rather an open community where opinions of every political colour compete and find expression in an endless array of media, books, magazines, television, newspapers, radio, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, even stamps, coupons and music.
So why is it then that so many Americans who consider themselves “informed” are uniformly incapable of grasping the political complexities of the Middle East? How could it be possible after the bloody images of children, women and old men killed by US planes, tanks and warships used by Israel in Palestine, and the death of hundreds, thousands of children in Iraq as a result of sanctions against that country.
The problem lies in the sources if information the public turns to.
First and foremost there are the severe limitations of their national television news programmes. A huge majority of the US public relies every night on television newscasts from the four national broadcast corporations (CNN, CBC, ABC and NBC) for their daily news “Update”.
Critics charge — and correctly — that such news sources put out only superficial snippers about crucial news developments. How do you cover the world, they ask, within a half-hour format that includes ten minutes of commercials, five minutes of sports coverage, and two minutes of weather forecasting? That manner of time-slot management doesn’t leave much room for presenting developing international events.
Though the “Big Four” TV news networks claim to the contrary, the part-time television news programmes are nothing more than visual summations of the day’s headlines. The result is “news presentation” in the most condensed, simplified form.
The best the TV news networks can do, in order to wrench maximum effect out of the medium, is to string together contrasting images.
And at best the American television viewer walks away with is a jumbled and ignorant sense of that is happening in foreign countries. At worst, his passions are stirred and he retreats into easy, irrational strategies of blind patriotism. For example, after the Sept 11 attacks in USA, and during preparations to attack Iraq and remove the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and shown daily by American television cameras, one of the most popularly debated ideas in the USA, was to round up all Arabs and Muslims and intern them in detention camps where they would be detained without interrogation.
This in America, “the land of the free and the brave!”
Americans desiring more detailed coverage of international conflicts have no choice but to shun the transient impressions of television and move to the US print media to satisfy their hunger for information.
But therein lies another problem.
The average American who considers himself to be “informed” turns not towards the scholarly or intellectual journals that specialize in detailed, cool-headed analysis from multiple perspectives, but to those two giant generators of popular public opinion “Time” and “Newsweek” magazines. (It is important to realize what impact these two periodicals have in the USA: they are the biggest mental boulders in the landscape of the reading American public, with a combined estimated weekly readership of 70 million).
Occasionally the informed reader in America many feel especially motivated to reach for the “serious” dailies such as The New York Times, The Washington Post or Los Angeles Times. But their “seriousness” — if that means extended, detailed coverage — is by no means a guarantee of objective reporting. (A glance at the New York Times editorial position toward Israel will quickly dispel an illusion about that).
And what about the American news weeklies? What do they give you? They are rich and they are powerful, and they are steeply slanted toward the official viewpoint. Which means, among other things, a bad rap if you’re an Arab.
They preside over the coronation of kings and the clash of arms. They have eyes and ears around the world, and contacts in high places. They are found in the streets of Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine and on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. The glamour-children of American weekly news-magazines are “Time” and “Newsweek”, and they shock, shape and shade the way countless millions perceive the world around them.
Together, you could almost call “Time” and “Newsweek” a sort of journalistic “Voice of American” aimed at the broad US public. But whereas the actual VOA (as an instrument of the US Department of State) deliberately attempts to win over world opinion to official US policy through its propaganda, “Time” and “Newsweek” unwittingly — and often wittingly — shapes American public opinion to accept the same things, and they do it within the “sacred” realm of a free press.
More important, both “Time” and “Newsweek” employ techniques that subtly bias the reader toward the US-government viewpoint. They do this in several, identical ways.
First, both magazines follow the same “scatter-shot” approach to news reporting where the practice can best be described as the instruction “make it fast and make it wide, go for surface, and not depth.” By covering and mixing in a little bit from every angle, each magazine projects the image or impression of having explored all avenues on a given issue or subject, which incorrectly creates the rather neat impression of a complete package.
Such an approach often requires a careful re-reading of the report to determine which news perspective in sum is the more prominent. From this practice, “Time” and “Newsweek” derive their so-called objectivity, and thus legitimacy.
Secondly, there is the writing style. Both magazines are written in an easy-to-read manner. Though neither quite reduces the complexity of international conflicts and affairs to that lowest common denominator of news presentation — the American television news report — they come quite close. Neither news weekly poses many digestive problems for the reader’s intellect.
“Time’s” shallow form has become so familiar, and so mimicked elsewhere, that it is even known as the “Timese” style of writing: short snappy sentences loaded with short, snappy dialogue, a fast rhythm, regular “ironic” comment, rounded introductory and concluding paragraphs, and breezy references to history, literature, art and politics.
“Newsweek’s” approach, though not quite as breathless, is not much better. This kind of writing quite naturally lends itself to an ever-quickening cadence which, in turn, often imputes a false sense of drama to what normally would be a quite un-dramatic, or distinctly un-tense or low key moment.
Finally, there is a deliberate, but subliminal use of graphics. The choice of photograph, its position on the page — all these affect unawares the reader’s response to what he is reading and absorbing on the page.
The techniques employed by “Times” and “Newsweek” are not so hidden away, so hard to detect as those just mentioned, but they are easy to overlook by the casual reader.
Both magazines have tremendous news-gathering resources at their disposal, but that by no means indicates that both always use these resources in the most objective manner.
A careful examination of their graphics is the first step toward dissecting the prejudices.
