SPEAKING
FREELY Afghanistan: US press
withdraws By Ben Schreiner
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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Lost amid the
attention paid to the historic United States
withdrawal from Iraq has been the fact that nearly
100,000 US troops (and a near equal number of
private contractors) remain entrenched in
Afghanistan. The 10-year-long war has indeed
become what many in the US have deemed the
"forgotten war". For just as American troops have
withdrawn from Iraq, the American press has
largely packed up and withdrawn from Afghanistan.
According to the Pew Research Center’s
Project for Excellence in Journalism, coverage of
the war in Afghanistan accounted for only
2% of all US press content
in 2011.[1] That's down two points from 2010, and
three points from 2009. To put this in context,
American media coverage of Afghanistan was on par
with that of sports in the last year, and only one
percent greater than the coverage of celebrity and
entertainment related news.
Declining US
press coverage of the war has no doubt been
hastened by withering resources devoted by major
American media outlets to Afghanistan. According
to the online press-watch organization, Nieman
Watchdog, only five US newspapers now maintain
bureaus in Afghanistan, while at any given time a
maximum of only ten broadcast correspondents can
be found in the country. [2]
This dearth
of reporters only exacerbates a wide public
ignorance of - and often indifference to - the war
amongst the US public. As per John Hanrahan,
former executive director of the Fund for
Investigative Journalism, states, "The fewer the
reporters, the fewer the first-hand accounts
needed for citizens to form knowledgeable opinions
of the war." [3] It is of little surprise, then,
that a 2009 Pew poll found a majority of Americans
believe that media coverage of Afghanistan "didn't
provide enough background info to follow the
news". [4]
But given the clear news value
of the conflict in Afghanistan and its relevance
to the lives of American citizens, (the war, to
date, has seen 1,863 American fatalities and cost
nearly $500 billion), why has the American press
largely withdrawn?
The typical answer
given by the press establishment for the scarcity
of coverage is that it the war is simply too
costly to cover and of little public interests. As
the New York Times' Brian Stelter writes, "The
news executives that pay for bureaus in
Afghanistan have had to contend with tight
news-gathering budgets, safety concerns and, in
some cases, a perception that American audiences
are not interested in the situation." [5]
To that end, Tony Maddox, executive vice
president and managing director of CNN
international, argues that, "Inside the United
States, you've got audiences that are beginning to
suffer from war fatigue." [6] (Afghan "war
fatigue" has never been of much concern to the US
press).
Such explanations from the
American media establishment, however, fail to
illuminate the underlying reason behind the
shortcomings of US press coverage of the war in
Afghanistan. For the decay in coverage is
attributable to a problem greater than that of a
press corps prioritizing perceived audience
preferences to the detriment of news. Instead, the
main factor in the decline in war coverage is a
systemic failure of the American press brought
about by the internalization of an US imperial
ideology.
Inevitable failure of
imperialism The American ruling class has
seemingly long fancied rendering American
imperialism as distinct from that of the
imperialism practiced by the empires of epochs
past. For it is claimed that American
exceptionalism - ie, the idea that the US is the
"world's lone indispensable nation", as former
secretary of state Madeleine Albright once
declared - has enabled the nation to practice a
benign form of imperialism.
As US
President Barack Obama remarked in commemoration
of the Iraq war, "Unlike the old empires, we don't
make these sacrifices for territory or for
resources. We do it because it's right." [7]
The truth, though, is that there is really
little that is unique about the contemporary
American style of imperialism. For all empires
have tried to couch their conquests in notions of
moral superiority. All empires have cloaked their
imperialism in the language of "civilizing".
As the British imperialist Joseph
Chamberlain argued in 1897, England's imperialism
was driven not by a "sense of possession", but
rather by a "sense of obligation". And mirroring
the sentiments of modern American imperialists,
Chamberlain continued: "Our rule does, and has,
brought security and peace and comparative
prosperity to countries that never knew these
blessings before." [8]
Consequently then,
claims of exceptionalism to the contrary, the US
is no more immune from the coercive effects of
imperial thinking than of empires past. For as the
late Chalmers Johnson noted:
One of the severe side effects of
imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be
that it rots the brains of the imperialists.
They start believing that they are the bearers
of civilization, the bringers of light to the
"primitives" and "savages" (largely so
identified because of their resistance to being
"liberated" by us), the carriers of science and
modernity to backward peoples, beacons and
guides for citizens of the "underdeveloped
world". [9]
It is this ideology, that
to some is considered very perverse, that has come
to be internalized by the US press. In fact, the
internalization of this ideology by the American
media has occurred to such a degree that the
nation's imperial foreign policy is not only
beyond media reproach, but is in fact all utterly
un-newsworthy.
After all, in the US, as
Tom Engelhardt puts it, "War is increasingly a
state of being." [10] In this context the true
story no longer lies in an ongoing imperial war,
that is, not in Afghanistan, but in the next war;
in other words, in who next shall be "liberated"
by the "indispensable nation".
So it is
then that in a year marking the second deadliest
year for foreign troops in Afghanistan, stories in
the American press on the "threat" from Iran now
outpace reports from the war in Afghanistan. The
true newsworthy story of the moment for the
imperial oriented press is thus whether the
benevolent empire shall move to "liberate" Tehran.
This, needless to say, is indicative of
the systemic failure of the American media. It is
indicative of a press which is wholly incapable of
challenging the undemocratic tendencies and forces
within the American political system. Obviously,
such a press cannot be deemed to be free.
So then, as many believe, it is with
having succumbed to the scourge of imperial rot
that the US press withdraws from Afghanistan.
Ben Schreiner is a freelance
writer living in Salem, Oregon, USA.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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