If international and domestic terrorism is entering a new and possibly more destructive and nihilistic era—as some knowledgeable specialists predict—it behooves journalists and scholars of mass media to consider how, if at all, the media criticism that reaches journalists can be improved in the years ahead. Whether or not the forecasts of new forms and degrees of terrorism materialize, intelligent and informed evaluations of news media performance in reporting political violence will continue to be needed. Yet the literature assessing how effectively journalism reviews handle their responsibility toward the media coverage of terrorism is minuscule. Most of what exists is scattered within scholarly publications on the media and terrorism, which do not reach most reporters and editors. Moreover, the responsibility of journalism reviews toward the news media coverage of terrorism has yet to be defined.1
This article explores whether the philosophy of “pragmatic liberalism” expounded by political scientist Charles W. Anderson can add substance and a new sense of direction to both scholarly and professional media critics worried over how journalists in democratic societies cover political violence and extremism at home and abroad. Although journalism reviews within North America will be the primary focus, Anderson's analysis and taxonomy of political deliberation in the pragmatic liberal tradition can be usefully applied to criticism of democratic news media coverage in other regions and political cultures.
Twenty years ago the weekday tranquility of Indianapolis, Indiana, was shattered when customer-turned-kidnapper Anthony Kiritsis seized a mortgage company executive, wired a sawed-off shotgun to his head, and, during a sixty-hour siege, demanded and received televised apologies for asserted commercial wrongs. Within the next month, Hanafi Muslims seized control of B'nai B'rith International Headquarters and two other buildings in Washington, D.C., killed a student reporter, and captured 130 citizen hostages at gunpoint. Two months later, a small-town bank robber in Youngstown, Ohio, took a woman and two children hostage and visited hours of televised anxiety on citizens in three states.
These nationally reported episodes, all occurring within months of each other in 1977, deepened an already developing debate among journalists, law enforcement officers, politicians, and citizens in North America. How should news media respond to the several species of both domestic and international violence that had, alarmingly, become a continuing, if not endemic, feature of public life?
Although emphasizing that the Hanafi incident required in-depth coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review took exception to the volume and visibility of most news media coverage. It asked: “By what standards … other than fear of losing out to the competition and the inherent excitement of live pictures of, say, a man in imminent danger of having his head blown off… do such events qualify as significant in terms of the values supposedly cherished by serious journalists?” 2
The real significance of this period in the late 1970s may be precisely in the reflection it stimulated. Thoughtful journalists turned inward to reflect on the interplay of their professional values and public obligations. Academicians intensified their empirical studies of political violence, the tempo of which quickened noticeably in the 1970s and 1980s.
The early work of Walter Jaehnig, a young Indiana University journalism professor, mirrored both these intellectual turns. He examined the coverage of news media reporting on the burgeoning episodes of terrorism and concluded that journalists were becoming “captives of the libertarian tradition.” 3 By asserting an unencumbered democratic right to report political violence without major governmental restrictions and by claiming a virtual exemption from an obligation to reckon with the consequences of their behavior, unrestrained elements in the press demonstrated what Jaehnig termed the “moral poverty” of journalism's laissez-faire heritage.4
It was difficult to disagree, in the abstract, with principles of “minimum intrusiveness” and “complete, non-inflammatory coverage” by the news media. These were the stated goals that emerged from the 1976 report of the United States Justice Department's Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism.5 But the Task Force acknowledged that it “may well be impossible for the profession to agree upon standards that might guide, if not govern, its members in this difficult area of servicing the public.” 6 At the time, Jaehnig viewed the terrorism of the late 1970s in North America as not having been “aimed directly at the community and its values.” Perhaps more prescient than he then knew, Jaehnig went on to ask:
But the question must be posed as to how the news media will react if the next wave of terrorism resembles the European or South American styles, with their more explicit political connotations. The problem lies in journalism's moral neutrality posture, which prohibits the development of an ethic oriented toward the maintenance of the community, its standards, values and culture. Clearly, judgments must be made by journalists that differentiate between the war of ideas fought within the legitimated institutions of the community, and struggles fought outside these institutions and which rely upon violence rather than verbiage, intimidation instead of intellect.7
Twenty years after Jaehnig wrote, a stark “new wave” of domestic terrorism arrived in North America with the deaths of innocent citizens in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, in the killing of law enforcement officers as well as sect leader David Koresh and his followers in a raid at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and, indeed, in the attempted destruction of New York's World Trade Center. Bombings in places as varied as the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and at a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia heightened American concern. So did reports from the hinterland of the formation of right-wing groups angry enough to form private militias. Even though the cause of the explosive crash of TWA Flight 800 has not yet been definitively established, we do know that 40 percent of all terrorist acts between 1990 and 1995 have been against the United States. How threatening that might continue to be was highlighted by the conviction of Ramzi Yousef and two accomplices of attempting to simultaneously destroy two dozen American airliners around the world.8
Obviously, no one knows what lies ahead, and one must guard against alarmist predictions. However, a series of the most highly informed reflections on the prospects of future political violence emerged on 11 October 1996 as the Council on Foreign Relations held one of its policy impact panels on terrorism. A major witness, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, testified that attacks on important computer or energy systems could make combating terrorists “one of our most important challenges in the coming years.” Anticipating the work of the new presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, she described the “hardening” of energy, computer, and telecommunication systems as comparable in importance to the Manhattan Project of World War II.9
Another panelist, L. Paul Bremer, former U.S. Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism, forecast a shift in terrorist motivation from achieving political/pragmatic goals to the expression of religious hatred. He raised the possibility that terrorists might acquire instruments of mass destruction.10 All the more important, then, that those who would be stewards of free expression focus sharply on the roles they must play in the 1990s and in the new century ahead.
However, the Council on Foreign Relations panel, although covered by C-Span, attracted little attention by the nation's elite press.11 This study will argue that to make a constructive difference over the long run both media criticism and scholarship will need to be informed by a conceptual model that focuses more sharply on the role of journalism in democratic discourse. My approach will be to apply to media criticism of terrorism the model of political deliberation in Anderson's book, Pragmatic Liberalism.12 I argue that the model can sharpen the focus of media critics, scholars, journalists, and citizens concerned about the news media's coverage of political violence.
Specifically, I will summarize and thematically evaluate relevant portions of what the American Journalism Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Quill, and Nieman Reports have contributed to the discourse on media coverage of political violence since about 1985. Second, I will more briefly examine relevant aspects of the work of two organizations, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Search for Common Ground.13 Finally, in the process of these appraisals, I will try to demonstrate how Anderson's notions of pragmatic liberalism can make helpful conceptual distinctions in identifying the roles that need to be played in democratic discourse on the news media and political violence.
Anderson, the political scientist, readily admits that classic liberalism and pragmatism are not obvious mates. Classic liberals, he notes, typically deliberate at the level of constitutional principles, political structures, and how they ought to protect freedom, justice, equality, the rule of law, and the mechanisms of citizen consent so central to the effectiveness of the liberal state. By contrast, the classic pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey grappled with how much of the truth human minds can grasp. Their “essential point,” according to Anderson, was that “the reliability and durability of our ideas, their ability to ‘work well’ in a variety of situations and to win the critical consent of the community of inquiry, was the best guarantee for finite minds that we were perhaps getting at the underlying order of things.” 14
Anderson believes that pragmatism is a “much maligned and misunderstood philosophy.” Yet it needs liberalism “if it is to have moral and political significance” and if it “is not to become a vague and indeterminate counsel, perhaps, in the end, a doctrine of sheer expediency.” But Anderson contends that the reverse also is true. If liberalism is to deliver its goods, if it is to be more than a remote abstraction, it needs “pragmatic method.” Thus, Anderson defines pragmatic liberalism as not only a way to be “practical” about liberalism but also to “add a needed dimension of substance and of community to liberal thought.” 15
To test his ideas, I will apply to contemporary media criticism and to the work of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Search for Common Ground (SCG) the four distinctive forms or “themes of reason” he believes are characteristic of the political deliberations of pragmatic liberals. To Anderson, the wise and complementary application of these forms constitutes, in effect, a “discipline of political judgment” applicable not only to the behavior of democratic governments but also to social practices such as journalism, scholarship, and civic action. Anderson calls these forms “reasons of trusteeship, critical reason, entrepreneurial reason and meliorative reason.” 16 The working of these forms will be described, in turn, and then they will be used to evaluate news media performance.
Although seemingly at odds with classical liberal rationalism, the pragmatic liberal, at least initially, thinks as would an orthodox trustee of social practice. When a new question about professional practice is raised, the pragmatic liberal insists, as Anderson puts it, that “the deliberations of an earlier age be retrieved, that the cases and contentions that led to this road being taken, rather than another, be reintroduced into argument.” The purpose, in the best tradition of John Stuart Mill, is to put “trusteeship” or tradition to the test and sift it for whether its wisdom measures up to the demands of the present.
Thus the late Professor Richard Cunningham, a former readers' representative for the Minneapolis Tribune and once associate director of the late National News Council, argued that insufficient debate and reflection on past practice had preceded the decision by the Washington Post and the New York Times to publish the Unabomber's neo-Luddite tract on technology. Journalistic tradition holds that the press, under threat, should not bind itself to publish or refrain from publishing what it pleases. Doing so, tradition says, will invite repeated losses of its freedom.
However, Cunningham argued in The Quill that journalists and educators spent “far too little time on whether the publication helped or harmed the perception of the press as having duties different from the duties of attorneys general, military commanders, police officers, and even citizens.” 17 Educators and other journalists quoted in the Cunningham column also brought into question the wisdom of acceding to the Unabomber's demands. “I think it is morally questionable,” said Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, “to believe that an admitted murderer is going to tell you the truth about whether he is going to murder again if you do or do not do something.” Said Reginald Stuart, then president of the Society of Professional Journalists: “I feel we have only fed the ego of an irrational person who has no respect for human life.” 18
As if to warn against repeated violations of tradition, Cunningham recounted how the Post and four other newspapers had agreed to publish the manifestos of Croatian nationalists who hijacked a TWA flight to Chicago in 1976. Then, later, Cunningham notes, both Post publisher Katharine M. Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee publicly doubted they would ever do it again—then did so almost twenty years later.19 In agreeing to the request by federal law enforcement officers to publish, the Post and Times weighed more heavily the possible loss of life by failing to publish—a prospect made more likely by the Unabomber's having killed three people and injured twenty-three others in sixteen bombing attacks over seventeen years. It appears that, in the case of the Unabomber, pragmatic liberalism tested trusteeship reasoning and found tradition lacking.
In recognition of the gravity of its decision, the Post, in the Sunday edition after publication of the Unabomber screed, included a trenchant debate of the issue in its Outlook section.20 To Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst for National Public Radio, the Post and Times decision was “wrenchingly difficult.” Giving in to the Unabomber's demands risked potentially lethal copycat imitations of his blackmail of the press. But it was a historic moment, Schorr wrote, when “the ancient journalistic tradition of absolute independence has run into a newer journalistic ethic of community responsibility.” 21
The second element in Anderson's framework—critical reasoning and its appeal to principle—was much in evidence in 1986 when NBC News generated the ire of many journalists by giving air time to a terrorist, Mohammed Abbas. Millions the world over heard Abbas claim that the United States had replaced Israel as a main target of terrorism and that, hereafter, terrorists would begin operating within American borders. James Squires, then editor of the Chicago Tribune, proclaimed in an editorial that if that newspaper could find Abbas, accused of masterminding the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in October 1985, “we would turn him in.” 22 Passenger Leon Klinghoffer, an invalid American Jew in a wheelchair, was shot in the head and thrown overboard to his death by hijackers of the Achille Lauro.
Mortimer Zuckerman, then editor of U.S. News & World Report, said Abbas's “only qualifications are kidnapping and murder.” The public already knew Abbas's views, and NBC's claim to the contrary was “absurd,” Zuckerman wrote.23 NBC, which did not report Abbas's whereabouts before or after the interview, also was criticized by CBS correspondent Charles Osgood, New York Times foreign editor Warren Hoge, Washington Post deputy managing editor Richard Harwood, and Los Angeles Times managing editor George Cotliar.24 They argued NBC had abused the tradition of source confidentiality.
But in the fullness of deliberation of how much truth telling is needed in any given situation, The Quill, the monthly publication of the Society of Professional Journalists, allowed dissenting voices to debate the principles perceived to be involved. Wrote former Quill editor and freelance writer Ron Dorfman: “It's not absolutely necessary, I suppose, to hear from the horse's mouth that the focus of the terrorist's ire has changed from Israel to the United States as a result of the administration's Mideast policy. I've seen analyses to that effect in a number of publications, including the [Chicago] Tribune. But it's not self-evident, and it's rather disingenuous to suggest that when the chief terrorist makes that statement himself, it's not news. It may not be a must-run, Liz-Taylor-killed-in-mudslide kind of story, but it is a story that a reasonable editor might want badly enough to go out on a limb for.” 25
Dorfman, respecting Squires's right not to value such a story, goes on, however, to dispute Squires's willingness to, “presumably, make the arrangements [to meet and interview Abbas], then alert the authorities to the scheduled rendezvous.” Squires asks: “Why should the news media worry about playing fair with a man who boasts that he will continue murdering, who is trying to manipulate the press to achieve his ultimate goal— spreading fear and intimidation right into America's living rooms?” Dorfman replies: “Why indeed? Because if the Tribune breaks its word to Abbas, other sources may be suspicious not only of the Tribune's guarantees of confidentiality but of other news organizations' guarantees as well. No reporter is under any obligation to make an offer of confidentiality. But any reporter who does ought to be prepared to keep his word. Squires says he is concerned only about the paper's credibility with its readers and with ‘legitimate’ sources who require confidentiality, like Pentagon whistle-blowers, and that such sources are capable of maintaining confidence in the Tribune's willingness to protect them even if it betrayed an Abbas or a domestic murderer like John Wayne Gacy or the Tylenol killer.” 26
Dorfman argued that Squires expects, unrealistically, that the readers and the sources on whom the Tribune depends for credibility will be willing and able to make such distinctions. “They simply aren't going to talk to reporters who may not be willing to protect their confidentiality,” Dorfman concludes. Thus, in the context at least of the NBC/Abbas episode, Dorfman plays the role of pragmatic liberalism's “critical reasoner.” He applies the principle of truth telling not only to what journalists print or broadcast but also what they may promise to sources, even heinous ones. He also replies to Squires's fear that editors who make judgment calls that endanger the public's support of the First Amendment had better make sure the decision is worth the risk. To this, Dorfman asserts: “That's sound advice. But so is this: An enraged public is better off having seen the face of its enemies than the cartoons people usually have in their heads. We don't want foolhardy editors. But we do need courageous ones.” 27
The third element in Anderson's deliberative framework requires that journalists not only think and speak but act imaginatively to protect liberal values. Thus “entrepreneurial reason” seeks a way to actively improve, protect, and nurture the practice. A prominent and poignant example is the Committee to Protect Journalists. Put starkly, its role is to combat the terror and intimidation aimed at journalists themselves. Founded in 1981 by a group of concerned journalists, CPJ is a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization that seeks to “monitor and protest abuses against working journalists and their news organizations regardless of their ideology or nationality.” Headquartered in New York City, CPJ assigns specialists from each major region of the world to “track press conditions … through independent research, reports from the field and fact-finding missions.” 28
Early in 1996, CPJ reported that a record 182 journalists were in prison in twenty-two countries at the end of 1995, with the top jailers identified as Turkey (51), Ethiopia (31), China (20), and Kuwait (18). It confirmed that 456 journalists have been killed in the line of duty over the 1986-95 decade, including more than 300 that “bore all the signs of deliberate political assassination.”
On World Press Freedom Day on 3 May 1995, CPJ named ten leaders around the world as “enemies of the press”—from No. 1, Abu Abdul Rahman Amin, leader of the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, to No. 10, Lew Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore.29
For ten dollars each, journalists can obtain from CPJ its Journalists' Survival Guide to the Former Yugoslavia; a report entitled Silence: The Unsolved Murders of Immigrant Journalists in the United States; or Dangerous Assignments Quarterly, a periodic newsletter on international press conditions and attacks on the press. CPJ regularly intervenes on behalf of journalists jailed or threatened with restrictions and builds self-help networks among journalists around the world. It also exerts pressure on governments to capture and prosecute those who maim or murder journalists.
Sometimes, CPJ uses Anderson's fourth form of reasoning—melioration—as when the committee helped gain the release of imprisoned Zambian editor Fred M'membe a winner of CPJ's 1993 International Press Freedom Award (IPFA).
On other occasions the protective shield of CPJ's recognition fails, as when Veronica Guerin, Ireland's courageous investigative journalist and winner of the 1995 CPJ award, was shot to death, presumably by the targets of her exposes. “By surrounding the awardees with eminent U. S. news figures and getting their stories spotlighted in the press,” wrote William A. Orme Jr., CPJ's executive director, “we want to show their nemeses that these journalists have many friends and that their friends will let the world know should any harm befall them.” He added: “CPJ's award did not deter Guerin's killers, but it ensured that their crime and its victim won't be forgotten.” 30
CPJ's message is beginning to reach prominence in journalism's conversation with itself. Nieman Reports, under the leadership of Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University, has been especially attentive to the risks journalists take, as has The Quill.
Anderson argues that the four modes of reasoning that are characteristic of pragmatic liberalism's approach to deliberation work together interdependently. Invoking Dewey, he notes: “The cognitive focus of the trustee is on practice, that of the rational critic principles, and that of the entrepreneur, projects. Those who practice meliorative reason concentrate on ‘problems,’ and a problem arises, in Dewey's definition, precisely when there is a conflict over how a pattern of activity should be performed.” 31
Nowhere was this more evident than in the summer of 1985 when the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 made how network television should perform during a hostage crisis not only a national but a global issue. Traditionalists examined and defended journalistic practice; citizens and government attacked the media on grounds that coverage was unprincipled and irresponsible; alarmed public entrepreneurs mounted antiterrorism efforts at airports and at key government buildings; and the public debate forced the networks to reflect upon and, at least partially, modify their behavior.
The most conspicuous behavior was the extent of coverage and how much of it was with hostages. New York University's News Study Group found that from the start of the hijacking on 14 June to the release of thirty-nine hostages on 30 June, network television evening news shows spent 60 percent of air time on the hostage story.32 “What most press critics found most objectionable this time,” wrote public opinion analyst William C. Adams, “was the remarkable succession of TV interviews with American hostages … several of whom defended their captors' cause, motives and behavior.” 33
To mitigate the effects of manipulation of the hostages by the Amal Muslim militia, CBS on 24 June 1985 told its audience four times that the Amal had itself made and edited the tape. Two days later during a hostage interview, CBS anchor Dan Rather warned viewers, “You may want to keep in mind that these men spoke as prisoners.” Adams, who analyzed the work of CBS and ABC, noted that “each day CBS seemed to grow more reflective and sensitive to the dilemmas involved in airing the hostage tapes.” 34 By contrast, Adams said, “only once did an ABC reporter on World News Tonight endorse the idea that hostage comments might be driven by fear.” 35
On the other hand, Washington Post foreign correspondent Christopher Dickey and other close observers said the blanket network coverage helped assure the safety of the hostages. “I think that on balance the role of the media—television particularly, and ABC specifically—was a central element in keeping the hostage crisis from escalating into becoming a hostage disaster.” 36 Significantly, the networks had held their ground against any blackout in coverage, or any requirements for pooled coverage.
Yet the changes made during coverage as well as after postcrisis reflection indicated meliorating adjustments had been made. Thus, NBC News president Larry Grossman, who has staunchly defended his network's role, revised network policies after the crisis to avoid fanning the competitive flames. The guidelines advised that reporters (a) stay in the background as much as possible; (b) avoid interrupting programs with minor new developments; and (c) forgo issuing press releases and public advertising of scoops, ratings claims, and promotion of special programs on the hostage crisis.37
Recognizing the volatility of television competition, a skeptical Fred W. Friendly, former CBS executive and director of PBS Media and Society Seminars, reflected on media adjustments a year after the TWA 847 episode. “There has been much introspection and meaningful dialogue. The question is, when the roof falls … do those lessons that we seem to learn hold up, or do they just come crashing to the floor with the debris?” 38
If pragmatic liberalism's four forms of reasoning adequately choreograph journalism's ambiguous dance with the devil of political violence, we need now to ask more directly how Anderson's quadrilateral can help improve critical evaluation of news media performance.
Using principled reasoning, it would seem reasonable to expect that journalism reviews and other professional publications would and should be interested in reporting to their readers what evidence scholars have discovered about the relationship between the news media and terrorism. Such reporting might be expected from a responsible critic of journalism's truth-telling role. However, in a survey of issues from the past ten years, researchers have failed to find an adequate summary or in-depth account of social science research findings on this important topic in the American Journalism Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Quill, or Nieman Reports. 39
These important publications ignored three of the most relevant books on the media and terrorism published between the years 1986 and 1996. The books are A. Odasuo Alali et al., eds., Media Coverage of Terrorism (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991); David L. Paletz and Alex P. Schmid, eds., Terrorism and the Media (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992); and Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, The Mass Media and the Theater of Terror (New York: Longman, 1994).
A sense of what kinds of insights these professional publications could have gleaned for their journalistic readers is evident from a summary of some of the key findings from Weimann and Winn's examination of nonstate terrorism across national boundaries. They reported their own original research and blended that with a wide range of scholarship on the “contagion effect,” that is, the likelihood that televised incidents of terrorism spurred further such violence. Using the Rand Corp. archive of terrorist events and the national television library at Vanderbilt University, they compared time lags between network-televised episodes of terrorism of all kinds and the time lags between the particular incidents that the networks ignored.
In the case of all three networks, the time lags were shorter by six to ten days than the time lags between nontelevised incidents. The differences were all significant at the .05 level.40 They also found stronger impacts on time lags when terrorism took the more dramatic shape of kidnappings, hijackings, and assassinations than in bombings and attacks on installations.
When print media are introduced into the analysis, Weimann and Winn found that “the impact of New York Times coverage is similar in magnitude and structure to the impact of the networks.” Again, the type of terrorist act affects the extent of contagion. For assassinations, “a decision by the New York Times to provide coverage is associated with a reduction in the planet's respite from this form of terror from 80.4 days to 49.7.”41
It might be argued that the small staffs and the comparatively low-freelance budgets of the four journalism publications under study would make it unreasonable to expect too much in the way of extensive and original media criticism of a complicated subject such as terrorism. Without conceding that argument, it has to be said that it is not too much to expect book reviews of major scholarly works, such as The Mass Media and the Theater of Terror, that synthesize a wide range of academic investigation of the media and terrorism.
Second, the framework of pragmatic liberalism would require journalism reviews and professional publications to defend valuable journalistic traditions and to assess the adequacy of such traditions in the light of contemporary challenges, such as terrorism, to liberal democracy. It is easy to find good examples of defenses of journalistic tradition in these publications.
Typical was the 1986 speech by Larry Grossman to a regional meeting of the Society of Professional Journalists. It was the basis of a remarkable article in The Quill. Said Grossman: “Does television's coverage of terrorism tie government's hands and unduly limit its ability to respond? The answer is yes.” And Grossman also conceded that “television coverage of a terrorist attack does tend to escalate the crisis.” But Grossman considered these the warranted price that must be paid for the benefits of a free press in a democracy. He cited a Gallup poll showing that 89 percent of Americans agreed with him and approved of television coverage of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking. Grossman declared: “The reality is that television journalists largely reflect the same notions of right and wrong as the people who are in their audience. No matter what legitimate grievances terrorists may have, television reporters are not likely to go against the grain and make heroes out of them.” 42
Not surprisingly, Grossman opposed press pools, uniform coverage guidelines, and bans on interviews with hostages or the families of hostages. To be fair, one also can find sensitive and penetrating articles that critique the press's traditional approach to covering the many species of political violence that seem now to have replaced the Cold War as a preoccupation of our planet. Writing in the American Journalism Review, Jacqueline Sharkey, a University of Arizona journalism professor, questioned how often unthinking habits of network video distorted American policy-making in Somalia. More generally, she asked whether network television's unremitting focus on televised conflict undermines public support for long-haul commitments in the Third World that are as vital to a sane future as the forty-year resistance to Soviet communism.43 Former New York Times reporter Jo Thomas gave a poignant and troubling account in the Columbia Journalism Review of the consequences of having American journalists attempting to cover terrorism in Ireland from their coveted and comfortable bureaus in London. She showed how they repeatedly failed to penetrate British public relations, the omerta of the Northern Ireland constabulary, or the iron veil of the Irish Republican Army.44
In a tightly written 1992 critique for Nieman Reports, Harvard University law professor Henry Steiner appeals to American journalists to shed what he believes is an ethnocentric mindset that effectively prevents the American public from understanding the true dimensions of human rights violations among Third World peoples. “To blink such massive and deliberately caused suffering has no more justification than did the avoidance by the press of what was happening to Jews in Germany in the 1930s, then during the Holocaust itself,” he wrote.45
But there were very few articles in the past ten years in which media critics reasoned in the entrepreneurial mode. There were even fewer in which writers put forward suggestions or means to ameliorate problems in covering political violence. Steiner's article begins to critique performance in a way that suggests better ways to cover ethnic violence. More explicitly, two years later, in a stroke of thematic continuity untypical of media criticism, Nieman Reports built on Steiner's work by publishing research-based guidelines for journalists covering ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union. The recommendations were excerpted from a Carnegie Corporation-funded project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ethnic Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union, and were written by Bruce J. Allyn, program director of the Conflict Management Group, and Steven Wilkinson of MIT's Department of Political Science.46
Allyn and Wilkinson not only searched the scholarly literature for insights applicable to media coverage of ethnic conflict, they interviewed journalists with significant experience in the region. “Wherever possible in these guidelines,” they write, “we use their words and statements rather than those of non-journalists, in the belief that journalists who have themselves reported on ethnic tensions and ethnic violence are best qualified to advise others who face similar situations.” 47
The guidelines are not entirely new, and the nomenclature is familiar. Pragmatic liberalism would say that their significance lies in the entrepreneurial way they combine scholarship, journalistic “field wisdom,” and contemporary history. Although the report was carried in the back pages of Nieman Reports and focused on a specific region of the world, its research-based recommendations are important as a beginning model for how scholars, journalists, and policy specialists can work creatively together. Entrepreneurship in the pragmatic liberal tradition could adapt the Allyn/Wilkinson approach to improve the quality of journalistic coverage of either domestic or international nonstate terrorism, or both. To convey the feel for their work, I have listed below their generic recommendations, followed by selected quotes and my own highly distilled summary of the rationale given for the proposals.
1. Cover each side to the conflict. In ethnic clashes, because each side's account may be either incomplete, false or misleading, journalists need also to cover those who know all sides of a conflict and supplement these with their own fact-based observations.
2. Present people as individuals, not as representatives of groups. Monolithic portrayals of contending ethnic groups nurture conflict. Assiduously avoid stereotypes.
3. Provide context, not just coverage of events. Do so by digging deeply enough into the past to avoid bias in recently written ethnic histories. Croat Franjo Tudjman and others depicted Croats as having suffered as much as Serbs in World War 2, a portrayal that may well have fostered violence-causing moves toward autonomy by the Serb minorities in Croatia.
4. Will censoring myself or others reduce ethnic warfare? “First, the issue is not whether the reporting of the facts about ethnic conflict will sometimes lead to violence—it will—but whether introducing censorship will have even worse effects.” It usually does. Second, as the Iranian Revolution showed, modern communication technology allows censorship to be circumvented. “The best journalists have realized that they do have a constructive role to play in reducing the level of ethnic violence, but they can only play this role if they are consistently honest and frank with their audience.”
5. Focus on processes, not just events. Report on mediation and negotiation, not just violence that catches the eyes of editors and audiences. Indian journalists, for example, covered the “successful process of trust-building” between the police, local authorities and contending religious groups in Bhiwandi, thus helping avoid the lethal riots in Bombay and other cities.
6. Seek to educate about ethnic diversity. “But a key question often not addressed is what kind of education is appropriate?” Avoid the risk of describing ethnic groups in ways that actually encourage “a political agenda based on ethnic particularism.” Show differences within groups, not merely between them.
7. Remind the audience that ethnic problems are global and that conflict management is possible. “The experiences of Switzerland, Senegal, Belgium and Malaysia show us that ethnic heterogeneity does not have to lead to ethnic conflict.”
If the Committee to Protect Journalists and the MIT Project on Ethnic Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union represent imaginative entrepreneurial initiatives to assist journalists, perhaps the Middle East Media Project of Search for Common Ground is attempting the most unique approach to melioration. It is trying to bridge some of the evident differences between Arab and Israeli journalists and seeking to foster mutual understanding in the region. With support by a grant from the Dutch government, SCG brought together some twenty Arab and Israeli editors to discuss and compare, as journalists, their perceptions of the violent conflicts that beset the region and threaten peace efforts to date.
SCG brought the editors together in The Hague, Netherlands, on 13-15 June 1996.48 Among other things, the editors agreed that they should (1) meet again; (2) place a high priority on mid-career skills training for journalists in the region; (3) expand their group to include electronic media; (4) study systematically the presence of stereotypes in the news media of the region; and (5) exchange visits as well as publish articles in their respective newspapers.49
After the meeting, there were signs of progress. The Jordan Times reprinted the remarks of Hanoch Marmari, editor in chief of Tel Aviv's Ha'aretz, a leading Israeli daily.50 Hirsh Goodman, editor in chief of the fortnightly Jerusalem Report, kept a promise that he would relay the complaint of Ziad Abu-Zayyad, coeditor and publisher of the Palestine-Israel Journal about Israeli constraints on Palestinian journalists to top Israeli officials. On 20 June, a report was published that restrictions on the freedom of movement of Palestinians holding Israeli press cards had been removed.51
Speaking more generally, pragmatic liberalism does not presuppose or expect that all acts of melioration will lead to agreement. Individual parties may continue to disagree on principle, not budging from current practice. One or more parties to the dialogue may withdraw or temporize, believing that thus far the process, as conducted, has no potential to adequately reconcile theory and practice.52 However, in Anderson's words, “ultimately, the goal is that each might be moved, potentially, to a change of mind, that the protagonists might come to adopt a different orientation than that from which they started. The trustee may come to appreciate that the existing practice is unfair and become the champion of reform on principle. The incrementalist mediator may turn into the enthusiastic promoter of a novel initiative.” 53
It may seem daunting to suppose that concerned scholars and their civic allies can make constructive contributions to news media coverage of political violence, either within or across political cultures and systems. Yet it may be helpful to at least allude to the recent experience of scholars evaluating the health of the still evolving, 200-year-old system of American presidential campaigns.
The Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation gave $550,000 to the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania. Dean Jamieson of the school, director of its Public Policy Center, and her colleagues studied “the degree to which the news media focused on political strategy or on substantive issues in the campaign coverage and, further, on how the candidates argued their cases—how much they attacked their opponents, whether they responded to the opposition's attacks, and how accurate the information was they used in their speeches, debates and ads.” 54
Moreover, the researchers systematically shared the results of their studies with working journalists as the presidential campaign unfolded in 1996 in hope of affecting the coverage positively. Among the major criticisms of presidential campaign coverage, four are most prominent: (1) Too much attention is given to the horse-race aspects rather than substantive issues; (2) networks rush to make early predictions of election outcomes, discouraging voting in the westerly time zone states that vote last; (3) campaign ads are far too negative; and (4) the amount of coverage is too little.
Researchers were disappointed when they found that the percentage of misleading ads increased from 14 percent in 1992 to 52 percent in 1996. Likewise, they were troubled when the number of words in broadcasts dropped 55 percent from 1992 and front-page coverage in print media dropped 40 percent. On the other hand, none of the news networks hurried to predict the outcome of the election. Network news was more likely to incorporate some of the evidence given by candidates in attacking their opponents. Also, campaign ads did more than pillory the opposition; they gave more of the views of the candidates sponsoring the ads. Moreover, the proportion of coverage the elite press gave to campaign strategy dropped from an average of 59 percent in four earlier key elections to 44 percent in 1996.
Jamieson, looking forward to more research using even better data in the future, summarized: “The better the quality of information on campaigns that we can make public and the more we can identify strengths and weaknesses in campaign discourse, the more impact we can have on media coverage, and, possibly, on candidates themselves. The response from reporters, editors, and broadcasters to our findings to date has been enthusiastic. Scholars' influence on the conduct of presidential campaigns may never be more than modest—but modest is not insignificant.” 55
It may not be too much to hope that entrepreneurial scholars and constructive media critics in the pragmatic liberal tradition can ameliorate the problems inherent in the news media's coverage of political violence both domestically and internationally. They may come, with journalists, to share the faith expressed by Tom Stoppard that “words are sacred” and that “if you choose the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” 56
NOTES
1. Five books that constructively assess contemporary media criticism (but pay no specific attention to terrorism) are L. Brown's The Reluctant Reformation: On Criticizing the Press in America (New York: David McKay, 1974); T. Goldstein's Killing the Messenger: 100 Years of Media Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and The News at Any Cost (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); J. Lemert, Criticizing the Media: Empirical Approaches of Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989); and M. Tukkle Marzolf, Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism, 1880-1950 (New York: Longman, 1991).
2. “Taking Terror's Measure,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1997, 6.
3. W. Jaehnig, “Journalists and Terrorism: Captives of the Libertarian Tradition,” 53 Indiana Law Journal, no. 4 (1977-78): 717-44.
4. Ibid., 721.
5. The quoted summary phrases are Jaehnig's. Officially, the document produced is known as Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, National Advisory Committee on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, Disorders and Terrorism, Report of the Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism(Washington, DC, 1976).
6. Ibid., 66.
7. Jaehnig, “Journalists and Terrorism,” 743.
8. Presentation by Ms. Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general of the United States Department of Justice at a Council on Foreign Relations Policy Impact Panel (11 October 1996), Burrelle's Transcripts, p. 23.
9. G. Kramer, Associated Press, “Police, Military Target Terrorism,” Chattanooga Free Press, 12 October 1996.
10. Testimony recorded by Burrelle's Transcripts, P.O. Box 7, Livingston, NJ 07039.
11. A database search found only an Associated Press article in the Chattanooga Free Press, a condensed version in the Orange County Register, and brief dispatches from Reuters and the German Press Agency.
12. C. W. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
13. Information on Search for Common Ground can be obtained by writing to its president, John Marks, at 1601 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009, or to its e-mail address, <searchcg@igc.apc.org>. The 1995 report of the Committee to Protect Journalists, released in March 1996, can be obtained at <http://www.cpj.org/info/glance.html>, which is its Web site. William A. Orme Jr., CPJ's executive director, is reachable through its headquarters, 12th Floor, 330 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001.
14. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism, 1-13.
15. Ibid., 4-5.
16. Ibid., chap. 10, “Political Deliberation,” 167-80.
17. R. Cunningham, “Public Discussion Was Lacking Prior to Unabomber's Tract,” Quill, November/December 1995, 12.
18. 18.Ibid.
19. Ibid., 13. For a different view, see David Boeyink's essay in this volume.
20. See D. Schorr, “Publishing the Unabomber Decision: Responsible or Reckless? Printing Was a Tough but Conscionable Choice,” and W. Serrin, “The Papers Submitted to Blackmail by a Killer,” Washington Post, 24 September 1995, C-3.
21. Ibid.
22. Editorial page, Chicago Tribune, 8 May 1986.
23. M. B. Zuckerman, “Playing the Terrorist's Game,” U.S. News & World Report, 9 June 1986, 86.
24. R. Dorfman, “News People Aren't Cops,” Quill, June 1986, 12.
25. Ibid., 13.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. “At a Glance,” a fact sheet available from the Committee to Protect Journalists, 330 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, or through its Web site: <http://www.cpj.org/info/glance.html> .
29. “CPJ Names 10 ‘Enemies of the Press,’” a Committee to Protect Journalists pressrelease, 1 May 1995.
30. W. A. Orme Jr., “When the Shield Fails: Veronica Guerin, 1959-1996,” Dangerous Assignments, Summer 1996, 2.
31. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism, 174.
32. D. Ward, “Terrorvision: TV and the Beirut Hostage Crisis,” Freedom of Information Center, University of Missouri School of Journalism (December 1985), 3.
33. W. C. Adams, “The Beirut Hostages: ABC and CBS Seize an Opportunity,” Public Opinion, August/September 1985, 45.
34. Ibid., 47.
35. Ibid., 48.
36. Ward, “Terrorvision,” 20-21.
37. Ibid., 23.
38. M. Genoevese, “Special Report, Terrorism,” Presstime, August 1986, 32.
39. The survey by Ph.D. candidate Susan Willey and M.A. candidate Jody Sow-ell of the University of Missouri School of Journalism combined both hand inspection of the issues of the publications from 1986 through 1996 and systematic searches of them using Lexis/Nexis and Dialog databases. Some caution is in order because they found that in some instances articles related to the media coverage of terrorism were missing from the databases.
40. G. Weimann and C. Winn, The Mass Media and the Theater of Terror (New York: Longman, 1994), 220-21.
41. Ibid., 221-22.
42. Larry Grossman, “The Face of Terrorism,” 74 Quill, no. 6 (June 1986), 40.
43. Jacqueline Sharkey, “When Pictures Drive Foreign Policy,” 15 American Journalism Review, no. 10 (December 1993): 14-19.
44. J. Thomas, “Bloody Ireland,” Columbia Journalism Review 27, no. 1 (May/June 1988), 31-37.
45. H. J. Steiner, “Reporting Ethnic Conflict,” Nieman Reports, Winter 1992, 14-18.
46. Nieman Reports, Spring 1994, 77-81. Excerpts were from a handbook, Ethnic Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union, prepared by Dr. Bruce J. Allyn and Steven Wilkinson.
47. Ibid., 77.
48. The author served as an observer at the Hague meeting.
49. “Update,” 5 Bulletin of Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East, no. 3 (summer 1996): 2.
50. Hanoch Marmari, “Israeli Media May Be Superficial but It Has Contributed to Regional Peace,” Jordan Times, 25 June 1996, and in Al-Aswaq, a Jordanian business daily.
51. Report by Hirsh Goodman to Search for Common Ground, 23 June 1996.
52. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism, 174-80.
53. Ibid., 177.
54. K. H. Jamieson, “Scholarship and the Discourse of Election Campaigns,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 November 1996, B4.
55. Ibid., B5.
56. Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, reprinted with revisions (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 54.