Media

In the war in Afghanistan, journalists report what they don't see. Most war dispatches are based on what both U.S. and Taliban officials tell the reporters. There is almost no real reporting. Quetta, the provincial capital of Pakistan's southern Baluchistan province which borders the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, is home to hundreds of Western journalists, both print and television. They depend on Pakistani commandos because it is not safe to move around without protection.

Government needs the media on its side to keep public support in times of war. Journalist Phillip Knightley writes for the Public I, "In democracies like Britain and Australia, with a powerful press and a tradition of dissent, or like the United States, where freedom of expression is constitutionally guaranteed, the media cannot be coerced into supporting the war. They have to be seduced or intimidated into self-censorship.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times examines some of the different ways in which TV networks are marketing the war in the US and abroad. CNN in the US has been careful not to transmit too many images of the Afghan civilian victims of US bombings, but CNN International is showing the rest of the world different images. In other words CNN is targeting audiences by supplying the different images their different viewers most want to see, typical in the world of TV marketing and ratings wars.

Concerned about appearing sympathetic to the Taliban, CNN chairman Walter Issacson has ordered his staff to "balance" reporting on civilian destruction and images of Afghanistan casualties with reminders of Sept. 11 victims and video of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. "I want to make sure we're not used as a propaganda platform," Isaacson told the Washington Post. "You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States."