In January 1991, American television viewers became aware of what was, to most of them, a new phenomenon: 24-hour news. Although Cable News Network had been around for the previous 11 years, it was not until the gulf war that the network became a household name. (On the first day of the war, nearly 12 million Americans watched CNN, compared with the network’s usual average of 1.5 million.) CNN gained so many viewers that its success generated the sincerest form of flattery: imitators MSNBC and Fox News.
Today, with our latest war, many American viewers are again seeing a broadcast-news revelation -- the program BBC World (known in some areas as BBC World News). As CNN did a decade ago, BBC World, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s half-hour news report shown in the United States, has rapidly gained attention, and deservedly so.
Since September 11, the BBC says, three dozen public-television stations in the United States have added BBC World to their lineups, so that it is now carried on 170 public stations, as well as on the BBC’s own cable and satellite channel BBC America, making it available in about 80 million American homes. (How many are actually watching will be measured by Nielsen in 2002.) BBC World was also carried on the Learning Channel on September 11 and 12, and BBC news reports are carried on a regular basis by ABC News. These are welcome developments, for “the Beeb” is providing viewers with a more detached, nuanced, and sophisticated approach to news than the simplistic fare normally doled out to us by American networks. And the atmosphere of the BBC program is refreshingly calm, sparing us the busy, flashy graphics and melodramatic background music of our commercial networks.
On the ground in Afghanistan, the BBC seems to have more, and better, correspondents in more places than its American counterparts. A number of them speak Pashto, Urdu, or Arabic. A seasoned veteran, John Simpson (I knew him in Beirut 20 years ago), actually beat the Northern Alliance into Kabul. The BBC correspondent Matt Frei found a way to enter the darkest depths of Taliban-controlled Kandahar. And their colleague, the correspondent Rageh Omaar, revealed civilian casualties in the apparently accidental U.S. bombing of the town of Gardez, from which the Taliban had long since fled.
So different is the approach by American and BBC reporters that one viewer wondered whether they were covering the same war. The viewer, Tony Burman, executive director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, said American TV failed to take into account the full international perspective. In contrast to most American TV (with some exceptions, such as ABC’s Nightline), the BBC provides more detail on Arab and Islamic public opinion of the American bombing, strains within the United States-led coalition, and the continuing lack of progress in resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The New York Times’s TV critic Caryn James likes the idea of “seeing the world from a broader perspective.” The New York Daily News says: “Watch BBC World News for one day, and you realize how narrow our focus is.”
What you also realize is the deplorable extent of American bias. Fox News anchors wear American-flag lapel pins, and CNN plays up the word “America” every chance it gets: “America’s New War” or “America Strikes Back” is emblazoned above a graphic of a slowly undulating Old Glory. In contrast, when BBC correspondents report, the graphic says only “Battle for Afghanistan.” (To be sure, entertainment programs of BBC America added a small logo of British and American flags after September 11, but the news programs did not.)
When Condoleezza Rice called up the American networks and asked them to exercise restraint in airing Osama bin Laden tapes filled with propaganda and possibly coded messages, they agreed all too readily. But when Tony Blair’s British government tried to pressure British TV into doing exactly the same thing, the answer was no. Summoned to No. 10 Downing Street, news executives were urged to consult British government officials before airing any bin Laden tapes, and were asked not to quote any Islamic extremists. One BBC source told The Times of London afterward, “government interference will be resisted.”
CNN came under conservative criticism for airing footage of dead or injured Afghan civilians and devastated Afghan buildings such as a Red Cross warehouse and a senior citizens’ center -- apparently caused by American bombing. After that, CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson ordered staff members to balance images of civilian suffering with reminders to viewers that the Taliban were harboring terrorists. Isaacson said it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.”
The Pentagon must surely have been pleased to learn that whenever its planes killed the wrong Afghans, CNN would quickly provide the administration with PR damage control. In contrast, the BBC made no such effort to neutralize the negative impact on public opinion of realistic war coverage.
Often when the Taliban have alleged civilian damage, American television news reports have quickly noted, in a kind of mantra, that there was “no independent confirmation of the claim.” But when the Pentagon made its own claims, such as a statement that none of its commandos on a night raid suffered major casualties, by and large, American TV omitted the chant of no independent confirmation. In contrast, the BBC simply reported what the Taliban said and what the Pentagon said.
During the early days of the Vietnam War, I was an Associated Press rewrite editor in New York. When reporting North Vietnamese victory claims, we were told to add the phrase “there was no independent confirmation.” I got strange looks when I asked whether we should add the same phrase when reporting U.S. claims of victory. I got even stranger looks when I noted that AP stories referred to “Communist-infested jungle” but never “American-infested Da Nang.”
While American TV readily echoes the administration’s description of the September 11 attackers as “terrorists,” BBC-TV uses the term sparingly, and its international radio arm, BBC World Service, uses it even less, preferring “attackers.” (The British news agency Reuters has banned the word “terrorists” altogether from stories about the September 11 attack.)
British media have a long tradition of impartiality. During the Falkland Islands war, the BBC was criticized for its neutral approach, and it came in for more condemnation when reporting both sides in the Northern Ireland conflict. That resulted in a law forbidding British TV from broadcasting the voices of Irish Republican Army guerrillas, to deprive terrorists of what Margaret Thatcher called “the oxygen of publicity.” The BBC got around this, in a bizarre ploy, by continuing to show the faces of alleged IRA leaders during TV interviews but having actors dub in their voices.
The ghost of Dean Rusk seems to haunt American TV. The secretary of state almost came to blows with ABC’s John Scali over his questions about administration credibility during Vietnam, and Rusk asked him: “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
That implication -- support us or you’re a traitor -- seems a factor in the reluctance of American news media to show more of the negative side of war. Walter Isaacson of CNN might shy away from it as “perverse,” but people do get killed in wars, and it’s not just the deaths of Americans that count. Thank goodness we have the BBC to give us a different view of the world, to supplement the cramped and jingoistic bias of American TV.
Anthony Collings, a lecturer in communications at the University of Michigan, was London and Bonn bureau chief for Newsweek, and a Washington correspondent and Rome bureau chief for CNN. He is the author of Words of Fire: Independent Journalists Who Challenge Dictators, Drug Lords and Other Enemies of a Free Press (New York University Press, 2001).
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