I don’t know if NATION media columnist Michael Massing’s decision to end his regular press watch column was voluntary or not, but since the War on Terror is anything but over, it seems like media critics still have a lot of work to do. The job of keeping up with the maze of contradictions, false impressions, and uncritical reporting can sustain a small army with no lack of material to sift through. His final column is called “mopping up.” I am not sure if it is time for that yet.

At least not if you read yesterday’s International Herald Tribune about why the Pentagon thinks it has created a new way to fight and win wars in its Afghan campaign by using minitiaturized mobile technology, with small groups of computer toting special forces on the ground calling in airstrikes by JDAM’s–Joint Direct Attack Minutions. Note, they no longer call it bombing. This combination of coordinated precison targeting, digital communications, long range bombers and new weapons like the preator drones is enabling Washington to wage war with fewer casualties and deadlier consquences. One twist in all of this is the call from the Afghan Defense Ministry on the US to stop its bombing. This is being dismissed in Washington as merely a sign of divisions with the new Afghan cabinet which is still fuming on the US bombing of a convoy bringing tribal leaders (and some former Talibaners) to the hastily staged inauguration of the new unelected transitional government in Kabul. The attitude in the Pentagon seems to be: ‘Don’t Tell Us When To Bomb, or Not to Bomb!

KEEPING THE REPORTERS AWAY, GIVING THE PENTAGON A SAY

Another unmentioned part of this equation is information policy. Walt Rodgers of CNN, a former ABC colleague of mine, reported this morning from the Tota Bora mountains that when his crew came upon a Special Operations team (several have been pulled out of that region, the network reports) they asked their Afghan “allies” or rent a warriors as the case might be to tell the US press to go away. So here you have the US military using military force to stop reporting.

What is happening in the field is not as insidious as what is happening in CNN studios where the Pentagon seems to have exclusive access to offer instant analysis. This monring, for example, a reporter BilL Himmer, me thinks, in Khandahar is asked to interview a Pentagon official, but of course there is none willing to be interviewed in Afghanistan. So he talks instead with a retired military officer Don Shepperd in a studio in Washington, 7000 miles away, who is working for CNN but flacking for the Pentagon. Q: General, its moving prisoners to Guantanamo Bay Cuba, a good idea?” A: “Yes it is, Bill, We have had experience there with Cuban and Haitian detainees and it is very secure.” Bla Bla Bla. Nary an independent thought is heard. The Q & A seems as scripted as the rest of the reporting. But wait, there is more to come, because now CNN, a news network, announces it will soon be interviewing the author and director of “Black Hawk Down” the MOVIE about US forces in Somalia. Adding this Hollywood dimensions seems to be somehow appropriate because of the blend between news biz and show biz that has long ago captured TV News, to paraphrase the IHT’s headline. “HIGH TECH WEAPONS CHANGE THE DYNAMICS AND THE SCOPE OF BATTLE” has become ‘high tech weapons change the dynamics and the Scope of Media.”

THE LATEST OSAMA RUMOR FROM A MAN WHO MAY BE IN THE KNOW

War clouds contrinue to threaten what there is a of a peace between India and Pakistan with Outlook India’s Murali Krishnan quoting New Delhi’s Army ChiefS. Padmanabhan to the effect that “any misadventure could spark trouble.” Meanwhile the Times of India has picked up a storyt from the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, Bin Laden’s biographer to the effect that Mr. Evil may once again have eluded capture. Here’s the latest

“ISLAMABAD, Dec. 27, 2001 — Suspected terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden is alive and has probably escaped somewhere to the southern Afghan-Iran border, according to Bin Laden’s biographer Hamid Mir.

“Conflicting reports about of Bin Laden’s death have been circulating to ease US pressure on the hunt for the Saudi billionaire, Mir was quoted as saying by a private TV channel.

“Earlier, a report said Bin Laden died of a serious lung disease in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains earlier this month…”

The Globalvision News Network has carried reports about bin Laden making for Iran, not Pakistan, but they have received no pick up in the US press. On Friday Night, the TV networks were all carrying a press conference from the Bush Ranch in Texas with the President characteristically optimistic and vowing to get Bin Laden and Mullah Omar no matter what. I saw few comments that suggested that there may be another way of looking at all this.

ROBERT FISK ASSESSES THE WAR’S PROGRESS

I didn’t have to wait long after visiting the Outlook India.com site to find the latest word from Robert Fisk, the English journalist who is both critical and well informed. His latest is not reported on even by many domestic media critics including NATION media watcher Massing who has been overwatching the networks and underwatching voices from aroad.

Here’s Fisk on the coverage and the story. ZNET carries his whole column which is always worth a read and shows how a seasoned reporter from another journalistic tradition can come to a very different assessment than most of his US collegagues. “‘I needed my old Irish journalist colleague, Vincent Browne, to point out the obvious to me. With a headache as big as Afghanistan, reading through a thousand newspaper reports on the supposed “aftermath” of the Afghan war, I’d become drugged by the lies. Afghan women were free at last, “our” peacekeeping force was on its way, the Taliban were crushed. Anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan had collapsed ? we’ll forget my little brush with some real Afghans there a couple of weeks ago. Al-Qa’ida was being “smoked out” of its cave. Osama bin Laden was ? well, not captured or even dead; but ? well, the Americans had a videotape, incomprehensible to every Arab I’ve met, which “proves” that our latest monster planned the crimes against humanity on New York and Washington.

“So it needed Vincent, breathing like a steam engine as he always does when he’s angry, to point to the papers in Gemma’s, my favourite Dublin newsagents. “What in Christ’s sake is going on, Bob?'’ he asked. “Have you seen the headlines of all this shite?'’ and he pulled Newsweek from the shelf. The headline: After The Evil.

“What is this biblical bollocks?'’ Vincent asked me. Osama bin Laden’s overgrained, videotaped face stared from the cover of the magazine, a dark, devilish image from Dante’s circles of hell. When he captured Berlin, Stalin announced that his troops had entered “the lair of the fascist beast'’. But the Second World War has nothing on this.

So let’s do a “story-so-far”. After Arab mass-murderers crashed four hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, a crime against humanity which cost more than 4,000 innocent lives, President Bush announced a crusade for infinite “justice” ? later downgraded to infinite freedom ? and bombed Afghanistan. Using the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Northern Alliance to destroy the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Taliban, the Americans bombed bin Laden’s cave fortresses and killed hundreds of Afghan and Arab fighters, not including the prisoners executed after the Anglo-US-Northern Alliance suppression of the Mazar prison revolt.

“The production of the bin Laden videotape ? utterly convincing evidence of his guilt to the world’s press, largely, if wilfully, ignored by the Muslim world ? helped to obscure the fact that Mr Evil, seemed to have disappeared. It also helped to airbrush a few other facts away. We could forget that US air strikes, according to statistics compiled by a Chicago University professor, (OOPS BOB, that should read University of New Hampshire) have now killed more innocent Afghans than the hijackers killed westerners and others in the World Trade Centre. We could forget that Mullah Omar, the mysterious leader of the Taliban, has also got away. ….”

ON MEDIA OWNERNSHIP: YOUR NEWS DISSECTOR SOUNDS OFF IN THE NATION

Ok enough for now. If you want to understand why the covgerage is the way it is, you have to understand why the media is the way it is. To help us do that, the NATION has a new issue out on BIG media and its influence on public opinion that is a compendium of the thinking many of the most informed media critics writing today. Check it out. I was pleased that they asked your news dissector to comment on a new chart of who owns what in the media that is folded into the new issue. For those of you in other countries, who may have a harder time finding the NATION, (www.thenation.com) here’s what I had to say:

“Ownership charts are at once a sign of the times and the sign that points to who controls the ways we understand our times. They are welcome, but as road maps to relationships that need fleshing out. In the real world, these entities function like amoebas, intersecting and collaborating with their competitors. It is their cumulative impact in framing issues and filtering out opinions that challenge their worldview that is more insidious. As Benjamin Barber of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland explains: “A year from now the mergers and alliances will have again shifted and some successful owners will be some other corporation’s prey. The players will not have changed, however, only the line score on their current game.”

” How do ownership patterns affect journalism? Broadcasters were into cloning well before scientists. Board rooms don’t fax the newsroom–they don’t have to. The ideological uniformity and homogeneity of their multichannel environment is, in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “pervasively invisible.” The many channels and choices are more apparent to the public than the narrow range of voices. Newscasters say the world changed “forever” after September 11, but media haven’t changed all that much. Regular programming and commercials were briefly interrupted, but it was soon back to business. Coverage of the world has increased only because Washington is more engaged in certain parts of it. While there is certainly more “serious news” than in recent years, it is still largely marching in lockstep with government policies. A post-9/11 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism notes that “while the news has gotten more serious, almost all of the change is focused on the war, which suggests that the networks may have simply changed subjects rather than changed their approach to the news.” Their sameness of approach and style is blatant; no wonder CBS and ABC are now considering joint newsgathering.

” As a media maker as well as a critic, I can report that independent companies like ours are having a harder time than ever in this über-merged environment. That’s because most networks tend to produce in-house or acquire product from other divisions in their conglomerates. Our work is rarely rejected on grounds of irrelevance or incompetence. What we hear instead from both commercial outlets and commercializing public broadcasters is that critically edged work is “worthy” but NFU–”Not For Us.” When documentaries of a kind routinely aired elsewhere in the world become programmas-non-grata, we have to recognize that we are up against a largely closed system (i.e., as represented by the chart’s colored boxes). Entertainment-oriented formats and formulas rule in a blatantly top-down, corporate-friendly climate, with little interest in dissenting ideas or bottom-up global reporting. This was always true; only it is getting worse.

“You have to get outside the box to see what’s missing–other boxes offering diverse perspectives, or public-service channels about the environment (not just wildlife), labor issues and forums for citizen debate. They are missing not because the audience isn’t interested–most viewers blast major media whenever asked. No, it’s because the power concentrated in this maze has, over time, replaced democracy with its own self-referencing mediocracy.”

OFFER YOUR VIEW

If you read this column regularly, you know that I do go on a bit on this same theme. At least you have a chance to respond on this site by writing, Dissector@mediachannel.org. Do not forsake me. Weigh in with your thoughts. Hasta Manana.