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MR. JOHN O'SULLIVAN
Executive Editor, UPI
PLENARY SESSION IV
“American Media and Foreign News Coverage”
Thank you, David, for those remarks. One of the great advantages that UPI has kept through all its ups and downs is that everyone in journalism has worked for UPI at one time or another. So we have a great number of alumni out there who start out with a bias toward us, and for that we are very grateful.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, there is a familiar complaint and ritual in American journalism, that of anguished self-examination. What are we doing wrong? Were we too soft on Reagan? After all, something has to account for his popularity. Were we too hard on Clinton? After all, paying so much attention to Monica distracted public attention from the balanced budget, welfare reform, NATO expansion, NAFTA, and other items on the Republican agenda. Such exercises are not, of course, wholly psychoanalytic. They are designed to push media coverage in one direction rather than another. There were few media brain-storming sessions for instance that asked, were we too hard on Reagan, since most journalists had a low opinion of the president and couldn’t imagine being too hard on him.
But there is also a genuine element of soul-searching in these occasions. That element is more American than it is journalistic. Journalists in Fleet Street, Australia, or throughout much of the world are much less anguished about their professional errors than American journalists. In England the editor of the Sun, Calvin Mackenzie, was walking through his office one day. He was stopped by a reporter and said, “What are you writing about?” And the reporter said to him, “We’ve got a great story here, Calvin, a really terrific story. And the best thing about it is, it’s true!” So Calvin picked up an old-fashioned horn that happened to be standing nearby and said, “True story alert! True story alert! We have a true story here!”
I don’t think it is possible to imagine that happening at the New York Times. The American stress on journalistic ethics, on rules such as the rule that you must have two sources to support a controversial story, the belief in academic journalistic training, and so on, all these stem from and reflect the fact that in the United States journalism is an upper-middle-class profession, much more than it is elsewhere. Such people who have been well educated at good colleges tend to have certain attributes. They are high minded, they are didactic, they like to think that they need to tell that they are better informed than their fellow citizens. They are ultra achievers, they are prone to feelings of guilt.
A fit of journalistic guilt has broken out since September 11 on this theme. How did we fail our readers? Why did we and they not know what was going on in the rest of the world, in the Arab world in particular, and in the Middle East, but also in the wider international world? As ordinary Americans were asking, “Why do they hate us?” American journalists echoed the cry.“Yes,” they asked, “why do you hate them?”
As a result of this kind of thing, the Pew international journalism program ordered up an opinion survey on coverage of international news. It was one of these surveys that asks 110 questions, but the broad conclusions were as follows: 218 editors of newspapers with circulations of at least 30,000 readers (that’s about 65 percent of newspapers in the United States) revealed that two-thirds of those responsible for assembling the newspapers’ foreign coverage rated the media’s performance as either fair or poor. And 56 percent of the editors thought their own publication’s international news coverage was either fair or poor; another 12 percent said simply it was poor. Two-thirds of the editors who looked at network television news coverage looked at it in a negative light, and 22 percent thought the networks actually did a poor job. Although cable television news fared better, 40 percent of the foreign editors described that coverage as either fair or poor. Overall the ratings given to international news coverage were significantly lower than those awarded to the media’s coverage of sports, national news, local news, and business news. They did say that coverage had markedly improved since September 11. Some 94 percent actually said that reader interest had increased following the attacks and they had responded to it. There is much more in this vein for those who are interested. The Pew international survey is available on the web.
Now why was there this relative lack of foreign news in the American media? Well, I think there are two reasons. The first is very obvious: the cost. There is a famous saying from British journalism by the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, “Comment is free but facts are sacred.” In modern journalism that has become “Comment is free but facts are expensive.” It costs money to keep a bureau in Beijing or in Moscow or in London. Very few papers that are not as large as the Times, or magazines like Time and Newsweek, can afford that kind of expenditure these days in conditions of great commercial competition. So they rely to a considerable extent, and in my view very sensibly, on wire services.
But there is a problem with that, which is, as you all know, being journalists, that editors and reporters like, where possible, to run work by their own staff, which after all is unique to them, rather than work from outside. So there’s always going to be a bias in the newsroom against outside contributions, and that translates itself into a bias against foreign and international coverage. So the first reason is cost and everybody knows that and acknowledges it. The second reason is that newspapers and television news programs basically believe that readers don’t want international coverage. They want sports, they want business, they want national, and above all they want local news. Now they are probably, or in part, right about that. I say “in part” because I think that this is explained by the fact that foreign news coverage is often not very good, a point to which I shall return. People also are interested in what has an impact on their lives. Much of the foreign news they get in American newspapers seems to them to be remote and inexplicable. They can’t really grasp it. It’s a lot of mad men in odd clothes running around shouting, “Death to America!” and so on. When they see that they turn to the sports pages.
Note that there was an upsurge in both reader interest and in foreign coverage after September 11 because all of a sudden that kind of news seemed as though it might affect their lives in the most direct, and in some sense, in some ways, terrible ways. But for the most part the broad truth is that the high cost of foreign coverage and what is, I think, correctly seen as lack of intense reader interest, means that, by and large, there is less coverage of international affairs than there should be.
Now for the good news: This, in my view, has not led to an American public quite as ignorant and misinformed as you have possibly been led to believe. Harris Interactive Polls puts out a great number of surveys on American public opinion several times a week. These show that the public does not, of course, know the details of international stories, but it has what you might call a good rough grasp of the broad outline of international politics.I’ll give you a few examples.
Asked to say which nations were close allies or friends of the United States and which were not, some of which were enemies, the respondents ranked 25 nations from friend to enemy pretty accurately on this scale. Britain, Australia, Canada, and Israel were at the top, and China, Colombia, and Pakistan were near the bottom. Pakistan posed a question to the organizers. They tried to find out what the reason was, and they think it was that American television viewers had seen a lot of anti-American riots and protests against the policy of President Musharraf. That overwhelmed the fact that the Pakistan government had allied itself with America and gave the reader the impression, not wholly inaccurate, but not wholly accurate either, that the Pakistani people were anti-American.
A second instance: In the same poll, over twenty years, the views of ordinary Americans about their friends and enemies fluctuated more or less in line with the realities of international politics. Russia, for example, moved from being very definitely an enemy to being very definitely a friend, and it’s about two-thirds down the list at the moment. China two years ago was seen as very hostile to the United States. By this year it had become more friendly. Again, that’s a reflection of real movements in U.S.-China relations, although I think Bill Gertz would perhaps suggest that those movements are somewhat illusory.
Incidentally, France curiously enough has moved in the opposite direction. Fourteen percent used to regard the French as an enemy; now fully 25 percent do. That reflects something, not I think the policy of the French government but the fact that a book claiming that September 11 was a fraud perpetrated by the U.S. government had reached the top of the French best-seller list and stayed there for a long time. This was widely reported in the American media at a very sensitive time, and I think it did actually have an impact on how people saw the French. I don’t think that’s a wholly accurate view. My view of the French is that they are tremendously annoying and troublesome, right up to the moment when they actually intervene militarily on your side. They make you pay for it psychically so to speak, but they have been very good allies in major crises of the United States since the Second World War.
Example three: Whatever view you take of the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the judgments of the American people are as follows: Do you think that U.S. support is too one-sided? The answers are, “We think it is too supportive of Israel”: 31 percent.“We think it is too supportive of the Palestinians”: 6 percent.“We think they have the balance just right”: 41 percent.“Not sure”: 21 percent. Well, I think we can all agree, whatever our views of the Arab-Israeli dispute, that the wrong answer is that American policy is too supportive of the Palestinians, and only 6 percent of Americans thought that. So broadly speaking, they’re getting that right, too.
Now compare this reasonable realism, qualified realism of the U.S. public with polls conducted by Gallup of Muslim opinion in nine Muslim countries, including five Middle Eastern Arab countries. Most reporting of this quite well-known poll, you will all know it, I think, commented on the fact that Muslim opinion was hostile to the U.S.and to President Bush by large margins. And that is true. This generated a great deal of comment along the lines we all know, “Why do they hate us?” But in some ways the two most interesting findings were that 15 percent of those asked thought that September 11 was morally justified and, much more interestingly, that 74 percent did not believe that the attack was carried out by Arabs. Of course, I don’t think these findings can be taken at face value. They are, in my view—and obviously other speakers will perhaps disagree with me here—the response of a wounded culture. They demonstrate the ambivalence of people who are faced with something terrible which they are tempted at some level to sympathize with, but which they know to be deeply wrong. Hence the extraordinary case of crowds cheering September 11 on the one hand and then blaming it on Mossad on the other.
My point, however is, that these kind of results suggest a detachment from reality in those publics that is not true of the American public, even when, as is often and interestingly the case, this very unrealistic view is based on superficially greater information. I am inclined to call this getting things completely out of kilter on the basis of a lot of information the “Chomsky effect,” after Noam Chomsky. Or knowing everything about a topic except the essential facts. Of course, in the Arab world it reflects that fact that there is a controlled and tame press in most of those countries. Something that with the arrival of Al-Jazeera is changing, and we must hope it will change more in the future.
But I have to say that the Chomsky effect is not unknown in the Western media, especially in outlets like the Nation, in small academic magazines, and in the paranoid extremes of political journalism, where people do not so much believe what they read as read what they already believe. This, of course, protects them from discovering unwelcome truths.
Now, why is the public in this country moderately well informed? I’ll give you two reasons. The media is available when people want it. After September 11 there was a massive upsurge in information. Second, there is an enormous variety of news and information outlets all the time for those who want it all the time. You can read virtually any newspaper on the web these days. And millions of people do. My own organization puts out about 250 stories a day, of which approximately half are either political foreign stories or business foreign stories. The result is that when it comes to the facts of something, the “man bites dog” story, then the news is available and the public can get it. It is not very surprising, for example, that only 1 or 2 percent think that Tony Blair is an enemy of the United States. They are probably either lunatics or Irish-American nationalists. But when it comes to the facts, the American people either can get them when they want them and they can get them all the time.
What is more questionable, and here we come back to my final point, is not the coverage of foreign affairs on a daily basis but the sophisticated commentary and analysis of foreign affairs that is often very poor. Poor moreover, not in the tabloids or in tabloid television programs but in the serious, sophisticated New York Times, NPR, ABC, CBS, and NBC. This coverage, it seems to me, is regularly distorted by biases in the higher journalism that is undetected by its practitioners. I will list just a few before I sit down.
First of all, and this was touched on by speakers yesterday, there is a tremendous ignorance and indeed an impatience with the significance of religion. Most major papers have little religion coverage, and when they have it they relegate it to inside pages. It is only recently that ABC News had a religion correspondent, and I am not sure that the reporter is still there. Most journalists who write for these kinds of news outlets are themselves overwhelmingly secular in outlook and feel instinctively that organized religion is a kind of development in man’s history that is gradually coming to an end. They tend to have an attitude of contempt, not hostility but a kind of weary lack of interest in those people who are deeply religious.
A famous unguarded comment of a Washington Post reporter was that evangelical Christians were “poor, uneducated and easy to lead.” In fact, anyone who has dealt with evangelical Christians knows that they actually have above-average education, above-average income, and they are extraordinarily fractious and difficult people to deal with. They keep splitting into different groups and forming their own organizations. Journalists often tend to assume that the progressive movements within a religion are those that are going to win out. They are accordingly astonished when the evangelical, Pentecostal, fundamentalist movements are the ones that actually attract more people into church, while the mainstream liberal churches are obviously somewhat in decline.
As a result, journalists have missed a whole series of important stories over the years. They are only now, 30 years after this important development, grasping the fact that Latin American Protestantism is making millions of converts and that the Catholic Church is very worried about this. And of course, they had very little idea until recently of the Muslim religion. As a result you’ve got a kind of split-minded coverage in which the tabloid journalists whip up frenzies against it and the sophisticated journalists are so much in favor of it that they refuse to notice those aspects of it that are genuinely a cause for concern.
In other words, the mental world of the media elite equips them very badly for understanding and interpreting a world in which at least 85 percent of the people are fiercely religious.
The second error or failing I would cite is media coverage of military affairs. Of course, there are many brave and tough journalists who cover military affairs, who cover wars, and I have the most enormous admiration for them. There is a book just out of essays by women reporters in Vietnam, and it makes gripping reading. Two of them, of course, were UPI reporters, and we are very interested in talking to those women who worked with us at that time and going over the ground that the book discusses. But it is fair to say, I think, that the media won a war in Vietnam and it has been fighting that war nostalgically ever since.
They predicted, for example, that there would be quagmires and stalemates in the Gulf War, in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan. Despite the fact that these failed to occur, they have still not really caught on to the military significance and realities of 2002. One reason may be, by the way, that they rely too much on the U.S. military, which has no real interest from their own standpoint in giving them too many insights into the new world of military affairs. Not until more correspondents run their own war coverage will we get a more realistic view of modern war. Unfortunately, that will probably also mean that some of them will be killed in the process.
My third and last point about this is to say that there is in the coverage of what happened September 11 extraordinary ignorance of the cultural roots of terrorism. The kind of interpretation that has not only been given directly, which is fair enough—we can all quarrel with open commentary and analysis—but which more subtly shapes reporting. The analysis that suggests that terrorism is the outcrop of poverty and despair. It is the result of the failure of countries in the Middle East and elsewhere to develop societies that give wealth and opportunity to their people.
Now there is an element of truth in the political aspects of that, which we could discuss. But surely ever since de Tocqueville, which is now something like 180 years ago, we have known that revolutions occur not when societies are static and undeveloped but when they are beginning to reform and people are being given hope. It is that moment which is of greatest peril to those societies, because it is at that moment that the social evils and oppressions which seem to be part of the natural order of things suddenly come to seem man-made and, therefore, intolerable. And that has, in a sense, been a staple of social science analysis, as I say, for 150 years.
The same is true of fundamentalism, which is not, as so much commentary seems to suggest, an ancient movement but an extremely modern movement; you can date its birth back almost to the sixties. If you look at the social profile of the September 11 terrorists, you do not find poor people who were crushed by debt or anything like that. You find rich young men who were well educated, and well educated, moreover, not simply in theology but in technology, in architecture, in science. A Muslim theologian said to me in London, “You know, there is one very interesting thing about these fundamentalists. You can look at all of them and you won’t find a single theologian!” They are almost all from schools of engineering.
Fundamentalism is not simply a religious impulse. We have obviously gone over this ground a bit already, but it is a political movement that unites two things: a puritanical tradition of Islam on the one hand—rather similar to Cromwell’s Protestantism—and a Western concept, developed by Lenin in particular but originally by the liberal economist Hobson, that blames the poverty of the Third World upon the capitalist exploitation of the First World. Those two fuse to form a very powerful cocktail of religious fundamentalism and political, revolutionary politics. By the way, it happened before, because Bolshevism was the fusion of the Russian autocratic system with the Russian revolutionary system to produce what was then fortunately novel, but now rather common, a tradition of revolutionary despotism, which is what we are offered here.I’ll move on from that because obviously people will want to quarrel about that perhaps.
So my conclusion is this. What we have to fear is not that ordinary Americans will be greatly misinformed because the American media does not cover international affairs enough. I personally, professionally, and for all sorts of other reasons, would like better coverage and argue for it. But it doesn’t seem that our present level of coverage is producing a completely ill-informed people. The public gets the news that it needs or thinks it needs when it wants it. No, what we have to fear is that serious and well-informed coverage in the American media of international affairs will be distorted by unexamined political biases and by the fact that modern, well-educated people have vast lacunae in their knowledge of the world in areas which they think somehow belong to the past, when alas, sometimes they belong all too credibly to the future.
Thank you very much.
