opinion

(IPS) - People seeking relatively balanced reporting about the international dimensions of the crisis set off by last month's terrorist attacks on the United States knew they were in trouble when they heard CBS anchorman Dan Rather react to President George W Bush's vow to wage a "war against terrorism".

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, (if) he wants me to line up, just tell me where," Rather, considered one of the network's feistier veterans, told his vast television audience.

It was an ill omen for press independence, which suffered yet another blow after a 30-minute conference call on Wednesday between the executives of the major US networks and Bush's National Security Adviser, Dr Condoleezza Rice.

The executives, representing the news wings of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox - as well as two international broadcasters, MSNBC and CNN - agreed that they would not broadcast live or in their entirety any future video-taped statements by Osama bin Laden or anyone in his Al-Qaeda organisation, which Washington has named as the prime suspect in the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

They further agreed that, to the extent such statements are considered "newsworthy", they will be substantially edited, and anything in them that the government might consider inflammatory will be deleted.

"After hearing Dr Rice, we're not going to step on the land mines she was talking about," Walter Isaacson, CNN's news chairman, told the New York Times , while another executive described the broadcasters' decision as motivated by "patriotism".

Media critics reacted with disappointment but little surprise.

"The television networks are kind of running scared in the sense of being very cautious about putting anything on the air that's controversial or that might be seen as unpatriotic by either their advertisers or a lot of their audience," said Daniel Hallin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.

'Watch what they say'

Hallin, who wrote an authoritative history of television coverage of the Vietnam War, stressed that the networks' acquiescence in the government's efforts to manage what the public sees and hears is nothing new. "The media, and especially television, have always been wary about broadcasting the voice of the enemy, particularly in war-time," he said.

"When America goes to war, so does the American press, as pumped up with pride, fear and anxiety as any trooper," wrote Marvin Kalb, a former CBS News reporter, in the Washington Post .

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters shortly after the Sept 11 attacks that the current crisis required that everyone "watch what they say".

At the time, he was rebuking a late-night television comic's remarks that launching cruise missiles 3,000km from their targets was more "cowardly" than flying an airliner into the World Trade Center, as the terrorists had done.

Fleischer later insisted that he was not trying to act as censor but the administration's subsequent efforts at news management and restricting the flow of information - even to Congress - suggest his words were prophetic.

Classified briefings

Bush himself ordered top officials this week to restrict classified briefings to only the eight top Congressional leaders. The unprecedented move was taken in retaliation for an alleged leak by a still-unknown lawmaker of a statement by one briefing official that another terrorist attack against the United States was certain.

Although Bush agreed to authorise classified briefings for all members of several key committees, his initial instinct to deny information to elected officials appeared to reflect a broader tendency within the administration.

Two weeks ago, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in discussing possible leaks, quoted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's famous words that "in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies".

Rumsfeld catapulted to national prominence as Pentagon chief during the notoriously secretive administration of Richard Nixon. Vice-president Dick Cheney, as then-defence secretary, ran the government's virtually seamless news management strategy during the Gulf War 10 years ago, when reporters were kept virtually imprisoned in briefing rooms in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, and at the Pentagon for the duration of the campaign.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who became a media star during the Gulf War when he served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Armed Forces, also has shown a penchant for news management. Last week, he declined to testify in public before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but instead invited the committee's members to lunch with him at the State Department for a private chat.

Coded messages

Early in the crisis, Powell reportedly asked the emir of Qatar, who has a dominant share in the Al-Jazeera TV network, which broadcasts throughout the Arab world, to ensure that the station's broadcasts were not inflaming anti-US sentiment. It is from Al-Jazeera that the US networks obtained Osama bin Laden's video-tapes.

The White House said its request to the US networks was based on two considerations. "At best, Osama's message is propaganda calling on people to kill Americans," Fleischer told reporters. "At worst, he could be issuing orders to his followers to initiate such attacks."

US officials said they are studying all of Osama's tapes for indications that he is delivering coded messages to so-called "sleeper" agents to carry out terrorist attacks, a notion which most analysts dismiss as far-fetched, particularly because alleged sleeper agents would have access to the Internet, where they could see the complete video-tapes from other sources besides the US networks.

As for the propaganda argument, independent experts argue that this, too, makes little sense. "It's silly to imagine that western public opinion is going to be manipulated by Osama's videos," according to Hallin. "His intended audience is in the Arab world."

Jeff Cohen, a media analyst and founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a watchdog group, agreed, adding that what bin Laden says is "very newsworthy. He's an evil guy who's exploiting real resentments towards the US in the Arab world, and the public needs to know what he's saying".

Other analysts expressed concern about the fact that the television executives responded to a government request.

"This could be a slippery slope," according to William Dorman, who teaches journalism at California State University in Sacramento. "It can lead to a frame of mind where they will accept some other limitation that's suggested by the government that's far more serious."

"If the press starts giving in to the administration, it makes it far more difficult for Congress and independent groups to express independent points of view," he added.