The Information War

AMERICAN MISSILES AND FOREIGN TELEVISIONS

l u k e o ' h a r a

Remember when we bombed the independent news media and suppressed their ability to dissent, curtailing the free-flow of information? Man, that was a great day for freedom of speech! (for our speech--I mean ours and everyone who agrees with us, which is what we meant? Right?)

On November 16 the Kabul offices of the controversial television station Al-Jazeera were struck by an American cruise missile. Sound familiar? If not, here are several good reasons for your hazy memory. That was the day that Northern Alliance and anti-Taliban forces first entered the Afghan capital, and the news was masked by the coverage of the fighting and celebrations that occurred on the "liberation" of the city. Another good reason for not remembering is that the bombing was not widely reported in the US. Even CNN, Al-Jazeera's broadcasting partner, did not run a story on the bombing. Other media, however, took notice. BBC reporters allowed into Kabul only the week before reported on the strike on the day of the takeover. The Pentagon denied it knew the building's purpose, despite claims that the coordinates of the broadcasting tower had been repeatedly transmitted to Washington. The likelihood of the pervasive U.S. intelligence network being uninformed of Kabul's sole TV broadcasting location is a probable fiction.

However, the Al-Jazeera attack was not an isolated incident. In fact, bombing television stations is becoming an embarrassing trope in our warfare. On April 23, 1999, the Belgrade offices of Serbian television were struck, destroying the satellite uplink and killing thirty people. Tony Blair, the British PM, came to the defense of the NATO strike, saying that it was a "legitimate target." This, despite Jamie Shea's (NATO spokesperson) assurance to the IJF (International Federation of Journalists) eleven days prior that "there is no policy to strike television and radio transmitters as such." Blair called the station "a part of Mr. Milosevic's propaganda machine" and insisted obscurely that it was somehow complicit in genocide. Serbian television was state owned, and as such certainly not unbiased. However, they served other functions like broadcasting the numerous and embarrassing "misses" of the NATO missiles, especially their unfortunate propensity for hitting hospitals and civilian institutions. Serbian TV's real crime was the same as Al-Jazeera's: they dared to broadcast an alternative view of the war than that of the Western corporate media giants. The maxim that history is written by the winners has become outdated. Our ability to write and digest history in the Information Age outpaces the victory. So, the cliché is reversed: today, victory is written by the journalists.

The ideology behind the news media is that in watching, the audience accumulates facts, that they "know more." This progress is illusory, however. The news consists of disconnected bits of drama, narrative, video, and commentary. The media is a valuable tool because it offers the simultaneous entertainment of an ersatz art form and evokes the credulous response of an authoritative voice. As viewers, we are natural consumers, addicted to the trafficking of facts. These facts represent little more than drama heightened by our indulgence in the importance of its immediacy and "truth."

The problem with news, as with anything authoritative, is that it carries the same weight regardless of politics or ideologies. If we measure our victory and the enemy's barbarity (our two favorite stories) in news, someone else can draw on credulous audience responses to the opposite stories. Truth in the public sphere is not determined by analytic investigation, or even by who tells the most compelling story; truth is a function of who can broadcast their story to the widest possible audience. The organs of that communication, technological or organic, are the new targets of warfare.

The problem of a polyphony of voices or truths is solved by force. When Israel bulldozed the Palestinian TV stations in Gaza last week, or when Mugabe refused to allow foreign journalists to cover the election, they demonstrated their understanding that information is a dangerous issue.

The war news in America is important not only to track our victory but also to advertise domestic policy as entangled in that victory. The most obvious examples are the star-spangled commercials, little more than naked consumerism hitched to the patriotic band-wagon. The implication that excess purchasing to combat the recession (already in the works before Sept. 11) has anything to do with the war is absurd. The only reason the connection is made is because economic opinions and business interests are given a forum within the programs. They speculate about the market and the news, in one of many examples of how TV news blurs subtly into opinion and advocacy. Anybody who thinks that the commercials during Nightline last only two minutes has been deceived. The commercial never stops.

And if anyone else has a different commercial message (read: propaganda) or version of the news--one hostile to us, or even just critical of our positions--we have the satellites, the cable networks, the studios, and the sheer weight of exposure to make sure that our view of the world resonates loudest. And if it doesn't resonate, I'm sure we have a three-to-one ratio of missiles to broadcast towers.

Interested in differently filtered war news? Try www.afghana.com, www.electronicintifada.com, and www.fair.org.