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MEDIA-U.S.: Won't Get Fooled Again?
By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Aug 6 (IPS) - When U.S. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge stood in
Washington last Sunday to warn that some of the country's
largest banks were being targeted by al-Qaeda terrorists, the
mass media splashed the news on front pages and television
screens - despite recent well-known intelligence failures in the
"war on terrorism."
And then it emerged that some of the information that provoked
the warning and deployment of heavily armed police in New
York, New Jersey and Washington, DC was three years old.
The media diligently also reported those developments
Tuesday (and subsequent denials from Ridge that the alert was
the administration's attempt to divert attention from Senator John
Kerry, who had just been officially nominated as the Democratic
contender for President George W Bush's job) - but should it
have been more sceptical in the first place?
''We covered Ridge's announcement live on Sunday. We also
covered the fact that some of the information was a few years
old, on 'The Early Show' the next day and on the 'CBS Evening
News','' says Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of news
coverage at CBS.
''We have to balance the public's right to know when the
government is issuing terror alerts with a bit of healthy
scepticism regarding the motivation,'' she added in an email
interview.
Right to know what: what the government is saying about the
threat of a terrorist attack, or if there is, actually, a genuine threat
of such an incident?
''It's very clear that intelligence has been manipulated by the
Bush administration (in the past). And part of the job of the
media, as much as to repeat what officials tell you, is to evaluate
the credibility of those claims,'' says Jim Naureckas, editor of
'Extra', a magazine published by the group Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
''That's really why you have the freedom of the press guarantee
in the constitution, because that function is so critical for a
democracy,'' Naureckas added in an interview from New York.
Just over two months ago the 'New York Times' printed an
extraordinary article admitting its journalists had been misled by
sources who confirmed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in
Iraq, the main justification used by Bush to order an attack on the
regime of President Saddam Hussein in March 2003.
The weapons have yet to be found.
''In some cases, information that was controversial then, and
seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed
to stand unchallenged,'' 'Times' editors wrote. ''Looking back, we
wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims
as new evidence emerged or failed to emerge.''
But could the 'Times' and other outlets just ignore Sunday's
more pointed threat, knowing that - given the air-borne attacks
against New York and Washington on Sep. 11, 2001 - a new
attack was a possibility, regardless of the administration's
intelligence record?
''If you're a police officer,'' says Naureckas, ''and need to make a
difficult decision about how to deploy your personnel, then you're
in a terrible dilemma if you have an untrustworthy government
putting out warnings like this because you make critical
decisions that could cost people's lives.''
''But with the media, it's far less clear that that's the case ... if al-
Qaeda is in fact planning an attack on the Prudential building in
Newark, it's unlikely that the population of New Jersey will be
able to do something meaningful to prevent that from happening
just because they read about it in the 'New York Times','' he
adds.
But not everyone agrees.
''If you don't warn people and something happens, and you
knew about it, you have a real problem,'' Democratic Senator
Diane Feinstein, a member of the Senate's intelligence
committee, told the 'Times' this week.
''The other thing is, by warning people and causing them to be
alert, you may very well pick up somebody who has been
skulking in a doorway around the World Bank or the stock
exchange," she added.
The 'Times', the 'Los Angeles Times', and 'Fox News' did not
respond to IPS requests for an interview for this story.
In hindsight, journalists might have heard a little warning voice
inside on Sunday when Ridge - who took the unusual step of
issuing the alert directly to newspaper editors and network
anchors via a conference call - used the occasion to plug his
boss's record.
Americans should ''understand that the kind of information
available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in
the war against terror,'' said the Homeland Security chief, almost
three months to the day before November's presidential election.
Naureckas argues that in this pre-election period, when the
public is increasingly divided between those who are ''very much
frightened'' by terror warnings and others ''who don't have any
faith left in the Bush administration,'' journalists must press
officials harder to back up their claims.
''Particularly when you have problems of trust with the
government, you need the media to do more to separate factual
information from political spin, from manipulation, and I don't
think they've been doing enough to make that happen.''
But according to McGinnis, CBS ''certainly check(s) out the
facts and report on them in a timely way, whether complimentary
toward the government or not.''
(END/2004)
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