Media

Apparently Muslims have learned a thing or two from America after all, according to Fouad Ajami, who complains that the Al Jazeera television network is guilty of "the Hollywoodization of news ... with an abandon that would make the Fox News Channel blush." Ajami notes that "Al Jazeera's reporters and editors have no qualms about challenging the wisdom of today's Arab rulers. Indeed, Al Jazeera has been rebuked by the governments of Libya and Tunisia for giving opposition leaders from those countries significant air time.

"Here's one sure thing you can learn from watching TV: Almost all of the people who seem to know anything are men," comments Washington Post writer Paul Farhi. "Men know about Afghanistan. They know about anthrax. They know foreign policy and military strategy. They know about terrorism and counter-terrorism.

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.