Who’s Side is the Media on? - The Devil’s?


November 10, 2001


BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Lately the media have come under fire from the Pentagon. Hostilities flared late last month when Marine Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold said that the combat forces of the Taliban had been eviscerated. Two weeks later that assessment was updated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who said that the Taliban still had substantial forces. That led reporters to question the probity of the Pentagon and the progress of the war and put the secretary of defense on the defensive as when this week he interrupted this exchange between a reporter and a general.

GENERAL: Yes--

GENERAL: General, there have been two different characterizations of the Taliban combat force strength from this podium. What is your assessment now?

DONALD RUMSFELD: He does not believe they've been eviscerated. [LAUGHTER] Of that I can assure you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: William Saleten wrote in Slate.com that the media were bad news bearers whose reflexive cynicism and impatience were sapping national morale. In fact, he says, though the media are clearly biased in favor of the American cause, the war coverage slants toward the Taliban!

WILLIAM SALETEN: Well there are two different questions at stake here. One is who's right and wrong in the war, and the other question is who's winning and who's losing. Now on the question of who's right or wrong, obviously the American media are sympathetic to the United States and tend to sort of skew their coverage in favor of their own government. On the question of who's winning and losing the war, however, the coverage has been slanted against the United States government in the form of all sorts of not just skepticism but sort of cynical dismissiveness about our prospects for ever finding Osama bin Laden or defeating the Taliban.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now you referred to something called vicarious doubt of reporters and that that skews coverage. Isn't it the role of a journalist to be skeptical?

WILLIAM SALETEN: I do think that it's the role of a journalist to be skeptical. My concern is that when you get an entire roomful of reporters who are all becoming not just skeptical but cynical about the ability of the United States to ever win the war -- not just how it's doing this week but how it might do several months or years from now -- that creates a pack mentality and you end up creating a consensus -- a zeitgeist that the war can't be won. One of my favorite words that I hear now a lot is quagmire. "Quagmire" is this concept that says: it's hopeless. You, once you go into this war, you're, you're - you'll lose -you'll kill civilians; you won't defeat the enemy -- give up. I mean that's the implicit message of it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Would you outline some of the stances that the press has been inclined to take that immediately put the Pentagon on the defensive.

WILLIAM SALETEN: There are several ways in which reporters while being politically biased in favor of the United States they construct their coverage so that inadvertently it favors the Taliban. One of the ones that I've noticed most is that we tend to describe ourselves as the subjects of the war -- we act and the Taliban are the objects -- they react.

Well, you know, superficially, you know, this flatters us cause we're the ones in control of the war, but actually what it does is it helps the Taliban because we're constantly supposed to be re-evaluating our strategy. We bomb them - if they don't move, if they don't budge, if they don't turn over bin Laden or give up, then, then maybe we should stop bombing.

We never of course ask these questions about the Taliban -- whether they should re-think their resistance to us in light of the fact that we're bombing the living daylights out of them.

So that's one way in which we, we, we-- impair the United States in terms of its morale.

Another way is American reporters tend to value American lives more than Afghan lives. If a bunch of people get killed in Afghanistan today, reporters will say well that wasn't that many people, you know, we really didn't make much of a dent in the war today, whereas if there's, you know, a threat of anthrax -not even a real an--anthrax letter somewhere in the United States today, there'll be headlines and you know banners across TV all day and all week.

By acting as though even the prospect of one death in the United States is such a huge deal and, you know, 50 Taliban soldiers getting killed in a bombing - there's no big deal -then in any exchange of casualties we'll interpret that we lost because that one American life was more valuable than 50 or a hundred Afghans.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I mean I, you know, I, I take your point, but the thing is, is that you've got a bunch of people who are trying to ask the questions and investigate something that they're entirely closed out of!

WILLIAM SALETEN: Here's what I'd advise reporters to do: if the Pentagon stonewalls you, say so. That's your report. You can say, you know, I placed 10 calls today to my sources in the Pentagon and to the o--the official spokespeople. I didn't get my calls returned. [LAUGHS] You know? I went to the briefing today. A bunch of questions were asked, and anything that was really important they said we're not going to discuss operational matters.

Just say that, and don't play this game of you know they're giving us their spin so we're going to construct this devil's advocate spin that the war is hopeless and force them to give us some information to the contrary, because after the TV is turned off, viewers will come away, you know, with the impression that facts were not disclosed but with this impression that every single question that was asked conveys that the war is hopeless and futile.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: William Saleten, thank you very much!

WILLIAM SALETEN: Thank you!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: William Saleten is a senior writer for Slate.com.