Amateur hour for US media on terrorism

By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff
Saturday, January 09, 2010

It has been depressing this week to watch mainstream American television networks cover Yemen and wider issues related to tensions and terrorism in our region. It is depressing because, with very few exceptions, the media that provide a majority of Americans with their news and views of world events is covering the Yemen story with a shocking combination of amateurism, ideological distortion, and selectivity.

If media are a mirror of the political system in the United States – and I believe they are – then it is no wonder that the past two decades have seen a steady expansion of two related and symbiotic problems: the spread of terrorism in and from the Arab-Asian region; and the spread of the American armed forces and covert operations in the same region.

Yemen media coverage captures this very neatly. The mainstream American media, especially network and cable television, mainly report that the problems that spur terrorism from Yemen are poverty, religious extremism, and ineffective government. Charismatic Muslim preachers, often using the internet, are also widely mentioned these days as a real problem that exacerbates the terror threat. In every report I have seen, without fail, the thrust of the report is that terrorism is a consequence of Muslim religious extremism that is somehow connected with a visceral hatred of the United States or Western ways in general.

The flaw in this approach – and it was evident in President Barack Obama’s remarks Thursday on how the US would improve its intelligence defenses against terrorism – is that it refuses to acknowledge that terrorism in our age is largely a reactionary movement that responds to perceived threats against those societies from where terrorists emerge. It is striking that in most cases of successful or failed terror attacks, the perpetrators or the organizations that send them to kill explain that they carry out their deed in response to the deeds of others – such as Israel’s assault on Palestinians, US and British armies in Iraq or Afghanistan, American drone attacks against Yemeni militants, or some other such issue.

This fact has been well documented by the pioneering work of Robert Pape at the University of Chicago. His analysis of over 500 “suicideâ€