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THE REASON FOR this war may be somewhat more clear—in theory, we’re liberating the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictator while liberating ourselves from $2 per gallon gas prices—but sometimes McDonald’s inchoate rallying cry runs through my head.
Whatever the answer, it’s safe to say that American troops are certainly not fighting for the right of American institutions to engage in censorship and repression.
But those are the very terms that come to mind in the wake of last week’s decision by the New York Stock Exchange—that most American of institutions—to revoke the press credentials of two Arab-American reporters solely because the NYSE didn’t like the network that broadcasts their coverage.
The network, of course, was Al-Jazeera, the so-called “Arab CNN,” which was lambasted by the Pentagon for briefly re-broadcasting Iraqi TV’s footage of American soldiers killed or captured near Nasariya last week. Never mind that Al-Jazeera producers removed the “offensive” footage after the Pentagon asked them to—in most Americans’ eyes, an Arabic-language news network that few have seen and even fewer can understand was nothing less than Saddam’s propaganda ministry. | |
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In that light, the Stock Exchange felt it was doing the patriotic thing by revoking the right of Ramsey Shiber and Ammar Sankari to report on the American economy in the same way that nearly two dozen other reporters from around the world do: from the floor of the Exchange itself.
Now, a couple of revoked press credentials may not strike you as a cause for alarm, but symbolism—why do you think we call our assault “shock and awe” after all?—is a crucial psychological part of warfare. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but consistency means something when the world’s most powerful democracy is engaging in battle under the stated auspices of exporting our form of government, our notion of personal liberty and our freedom of the press to the very parts of the world served by Al-Jazeera.
In that light, New York Stock Exchange spokesman Robert Zito’s explanation for booting Shiber and Sankari rang extremely hollow.
“I think the stuff over the weekend,” Zito told the New York Times, referring to Al-Jazeera’s brief broadcast of the Iraqi TV footage. “As I’m looking at where our priorities should be, led me to believe that if I was trying to accommodate responsible news organizations, I couldn’t include Al-Jazeera in that group.”
Earlier in the week, a different NYSE spokesman gave an entirely different reason (can’t these guys get their story straight?). Ray Pellecchia said that the Exchange had to boot Al-Jazeera because the NYSE has a finite number of broadcast slots available, and wanted to give priority to networks that “investors look to to find out what’s going on in the market.” He was later forced to admit that Al-Jazeera was the only one of more than two-dozen networks that broadcast from the NYSE trading floor to lose its credentials.
Never mind that both Shiber and Sankari are Americans. It would be hard to find less likely candidates for the Saddam Hussein Liberty Medal: Shiber is a naturalized citizen who came here to study business in 1982. Sankari moved here a few years later and isn’t afraid to say where his loyalties stand.
“I love this country,” he told the Times. Shiber sounded equally in love with American freedoms when I called him. “I’m an American,” he told me, still confused by the Stock Exchange’s decision.
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“I don’t get it,” he said. “Our coverage is not slanted or propaganda. We just report on American economic news. I’d love for someone to review all our coverage and tell me where the ‘Arab spin’ is. We don’t do anything different than any of the other foreign reporters. Maybe someone is upset because we’re more accurate.”
Listen, I’m not going to defend Al-Jazeera—hell, I can’t even read its main Web site (or its perpetually hacked English-language version) and I can’t watch its broadcasts because I don’t have a satellite dish—but credible journalism experts who do watch it describe it as no more rah-rah than our own Fox News Channel. Al-Jazeera’s only sin seems to be its commitment to get the other side of stories that the American media have already pre-judged—the grieving widow of an overaggressive Israeli incursion, the Iraqi general complaining about America’s invasion of his country, the Egyptian “intellectual” urging a fight against the world’s lone superpower in the name of Arab solidarity.
Is Al-Jazeera occasionally used by evil people to get their evil message out? Of course it is, but no more than American leaders use CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to give daily briefings of our ongoing success in bombing the cradle of human civilization back to the Stone Age. And just as history is written by the winners, one side’s fair and balanced reporting is the other side’s propaganda. The media—whether in the United States or in Doha, Qatar—doesn’t tend to censor itself. We’ll provide ample coverage to anyone who claims to speak for his people. So if Donald Rumsfeld can get unfettered access to his constituency via a largely doormat press corps, why can’t Osama bin Laden?
I’m not likening our Secretary of Defense to the world’s second-most evil man (who was No. 1 for about a year, but we got bored and needed a new villain). But whatever your feelings about President Bush’s jihad against Saddam Hussein, it certainly is not being waged in the name of allowing our most sacred institutions to engage in censorship.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv
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© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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