Review of the book-No Questions Asked : News Coverage since 9/11 By Lisa Finnegan

You can find more info about the book at http://www.noquestionsasked.org

 

 

http://www.ilcaonline.org/ht/display/ArticleDetails/i/53162

 

If Bacon's book is a window, Lisa Finnegan's is an indictment: No
Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11 is a clear-headed,
methodical exposition on the media's failings since that fateful day. And because
those failings amount to a dereliction of duty by the unofficial
fourth pillar of democratic society, the Bush administration was enabled to
run amok, trampling civil liberties and due process at home while
destabilizing the world's most volatile region--an outcome
foreshadowed by the Voltaire quotation that opens the preface, "Those who can make
you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

For news people who have been paying attention, much of what Finnegan
details will be familiar: the fear by virtually all the media of being
viewed as unpatriotic, the failure to question governmental
over-reaching, the sacrifice of objectivity through embedding, the
indifference to uncomfortable truths--even the unquestioned
willingness to serve as propaganda vehicles. But what distinguishes this account
is its extraordinarily dispassionate yet relentless piling on of detail,
eventually reaching a suffocating density.

Some of the preparation of the soil for rampant falsehood long
predates Sept. 11, such as the years-long decline in foreign news coverage.
International news accounted for a mere 2% of total news coverage in
1998, Finnegan notes, down from 10% in 1983; network coverage of
international news plummeted from 45% of news broadcasts in 1970 to
13.5% in 1995. No wonder, then, that George Bush could address
Congress on Sept. 20 in a virtual vacuum of public understanding of global
tensions. "Americans are asking, why do they hate us?" he asked
rhetorically. "They hate what we see right here in this chamber: a
democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed.
They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

With that thin reed of understanding, apparently unconscious of how it
contradicted Bush's companion threat that "you*re either with us or
you're against us," the U.S. eventually plunged into war and the
media faithfully tagged along. White House requests for
self-censorship were honored, administration choices of terminology were adopted, hard
questions were avoided. Relatively rare skeptical reporting was buried
deep within the few newspapers that carried it, with some reporters
simply fired for their failure to toe the "patriotic" line.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, was getting far more critical and
comprehensive news coverage, creating an ever-wider disconnect between
the world-view of Americans and that of their increasingly discomfited
allies. Yet every sign of foreign restraint became just one more sign
of how exceptional the U.S. had become, how singularly insightful and
decisive this country was in a craven world of terrorist appeasers.
And when the truth was too stark to be spun, the U.S. media developed a
fine talent for simply ignoring it. Most notable in this respect was the
mass murder of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan, documented in a film and
widely reported by the European press--yet as Finnegan reports, "an
extensive Lexis/Nexus search found no mention of it anywhere in the
U.S. media."

Finnegan's unique perspective is that she approaches her subject
matter as a journalist  who earned a master's degree in educational
psychology after the events of Sept. 11. But while the blending of these
perspectives provides an academic frame for her understanding of the
psychology of terrorism and how it affects the media, it's
Finnegan's working knowledge of journalists and their group-think tendencies that
enables her to connect the dots in so devastating a fashion. Reading
No Questions Asked is a sobering task, and one that should be required of
any aspiring journalist before he or she takes on the mantle.