reply by
Reality Check
4/11/2002 (9:09) |
|
By William McGowan, author of Coloring the News: How Crusading For Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.
November 8, 2001 8:25 a.m.
Opinion polls show the press enjoying unprecedented public approval. Ratings have risen as high as 89 percent, in response to commendable reporting on the World Trade Center attack, U.S. military actions in Afghanistan, and the ongoing specter of bioterrorism, in which the media itself has become a sympathetic victim.
But before the pile of bouquets grows too high, maybe we should stop and pull a flower or two from the stack.
Postmortem analyses of the attack have pointed out significant weaknesses in immigration policies and practices, which terrorists were able to exploit to embed themselves in our society and operate below the radar. Yet the journalistic establishment, too, bears some responsibility for our unpreparedness on September 11. Viewing the issue of immigration largely through rose-colored, ideological glasses, the press has long given minimal attention to the many holes in the state and federal immigration net. Though September 11 has indeed spurred much of the media to better immigration reporting, there is still considerable evidence of a politically correct mindset — one largely reflected in the new solicitude toward Muslim and Arab immigrants and the place of Islam in a multicultural America.
After the 1993 Trade Center bombing, U.S. officials overseas were supposed to tighten screening procedures for visas issued to the more than 10 million foreigners who apply for them annually. (Seven million — including nine of the hijackers — got them.) But the screening system is still spectacularly lax and badly run. Consular officers have not had access to FBI criminal databases and face tremendous pressures for fear of offending 'the host country' by denying too many applications. In some cases, much of the day-to-day work is performed by non-American nationals in the embassy employ, their loyalties uncertain. (This is distressingly so where 15 of the hijackers came from: Saudi Arabia.) Intelligence, law enforcement, and immigration reformers have been trying to draw attention to the disarray in the visa-issuance system. But aside from the Washington Times, database searches show a minimal press response — the watchdog that did not bark.
There have also been considerable weaknesses in the monitoring of visitors, especially those using flights from Egypt and Saudi Arabia — and the press seems uninterested here as well. For a decade, federal officials have asked foreign airlines to electronically provide passenger lists when planes begin flights to the U.S. These electronic transmissions, called the Advance Passenger Screening System, allow customs and immigration officers at points of arrival to get a head start on checking names against watch lists of high-risk passengers — a process that takes considerable time given the fragmentation of various federal agencies' databases. Ninety-four foreign airlines cooperate, but Egypt Air and Saudi Arabian Airlines have refused to do so for years (and still do).
This is not a small story, especially in light of the billions we give both those countries, and how virulent their Muslim-fundamentalist problems are. Yet a database search of the major newspapers reveals that no attention was paid to this gap at all, unless you count a breezy 1997 New York Times travel-section piece aptly headlined 'Zipping Through Customs.' Visa policies involving foreign access to U.S. aviation also seem to have some glitches. Countries like Syria are barred from landing their planes in the U.S. because of their support for terrorism. Syrian pilots, however, can get U.S. visas for purposes of taking private flight-school instruction. But this situation, too, received no attention from any major American news organization until FOX News reported it October 21 — another revelatory 'sin of omission.'
Visa overstays are another weak spot, both in terms of policies and press coverage. The Immigration Reform Act of 1996 was supposed to introduce a tracking system to match entries and exits (the number of overstays is estimated at 2 million, growing by 125,000 every year). But Congress never implemented that tracking system, and the few press reports that addressed the issue gave prominence to minimizers, like the representative from the American Immigration Lawyers Association who told Congress recently that most overstays were 'innocent' people spending 'an extra week at Disneyland.'
News organizations have also been remiss with respect to academic institutions' opposition to a much-needed system for monitoring student visa holders. (There are 500,000 foreign students in the country now, their exact whereabouts untracked; according to officials, one hijacker had a visa to study at a California Berlitz school but never showed up for class.) Many of the universities that have objected to tracking have done so because they don't want the bureaucratic hassles, because they fear loss of revenue if foreign enrollments dip (foreign students often pay full tuition), and because they feel that treating foreign students differently from American citizens is stigmatizing and discriminatory. This is a good story.
Another good story is the intense bureaucratic warfare within the INS over the failure to fund and implement this student-tracking program. But again, on both of these angles, coverage was minimal and the stories that did surface cast academic anti-border types in a positive light.
Coverage of problems associated with illegal-immigrant access to state driver's licenses and other documents has also been remiss. According to authorities, many of the hijackers obtained multiple state driver's licenses, using them to blend into society or to bolster false identities that made them difficult for law enforcement to identify or track. Yet when the subject of illegal-alien access to driver's licenses got any press attention at all, most analyses presented it favorably — as a way for illegals to connect to mainstream society and economic opportunity, and as a way for them to feel more 'personal independence.'
A New York Times story about the situation in North Carolina, published a month before 9/11, cheered liberal licensing policies as a sign of illegal aliens' 'increasing acceptance in society,' and closed with a bit of victimology from an emissary of Mexican President Vincente Fox, who scolded U.S. states that do not grant licenses to illegal immigrants. 'These are the people who are building the roads in America,' he said caustically of license-less illegals. 'But they're not allowed to drive on them.'
A similar lack of press scrutiny has extended to specialty licenses too, such as the 'hazardous material' (hazmat) permits the FBI now believes several dozen suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants sought through a Colorado truck-driving school. According to Time, the men paid cash, and did not use the school's job-placement services — an important aspect of the program's appeal. They also could speak no English, relying on a translator they brought along, yet somehow passed the state's hazmat written exam, which is given only in English.
In a less politically correct newsroom climate, a local or regional news organization might have taken notice or at least given a second look to some of the oddities involved here. But no notice was taken, and almost two months after 9/11, authorities are still anxious that some of the 30,000 hazmat trucks out there might be turned into rolling bombs.
In the days since the attack, almost all major newspapers and networks — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and NPR — have played a fast game of catch-up, producing reports showing how lapses in the immigration system, including several noted above, contributed to the terrorists' effectiveness. Editorial writers at the New York Times have even touted provisions of the 1996 Immigration Reform Act that the paper had before broadly attacked — though instead of admitting the Times's responsibility in helping to neuter the 1996 law, the editorial page blamed 'a lack of collaboration between government agencies.' The Times is also now calling to increase security along our 'porous borders,' after years of reporting and commentary shot through with the assumption that illegal immigration was not such a big deal. (New York Times Magazine: 'What Immigrantion Crisis?')
But a reflexive, pro-diversity newsroom climate survives, especially with respect to post-9/11 coverage of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, who have become the objects du jure of journalistic piety and skittishness. Although many Muslim-Americans are appalled by the terrorist attack, a larger proportion than has been admitted have expressed approval.
When stark anti-American attitudes are highlighted, they're seen through the lens of cultural relativism. Case in point: a recent New York Times piece on attitudes of Muslim teenagers in a private Islamic academy in Brooklyn. According to the reporter, Susan Sachs, some of the Pakistani, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Palestinian immigrant teens interviewed for this piece have little feeling toward their new nation, and think the ideal society would follow Islamic law and make no separation between religion and state. One 17-year-old boy said he would support any leader he determined to be an observant Muslim who was fighting for an Islamic cause, even if that meant abandoning the U.S., or going to jail to avoid U.S. military service. Other students expressed 'empathy for the young Muslims around the world who profess hated for America and Americans.' Yet instead of seeing such sentiments as worrying examples of dual loyalty (i.e., no loyalty), Sachs tepidly described them as a sign of 'the strain' that immigrants and their children traditionally can feel 'between their adopted and native culture.'
More active, adult terrorist sympathizers have gotten easy treatment too. When most of the prominent Muslims recently invited to the White House were identified as known sympathizers with other terrorist causes in the Middle East (The New Republic, October 15), the story and its implications got little play. On October 19, the Times made mention that pre 9-11 'incendiary anti-American messages' were long a 'staple' at some Muslim events, but added that the attack had prompted influential Muslim-American clerics to 'temper their tone.' But the story of incendiary rhetoric should have been done long ago — and the ongoing militancy of some of these clerics post-9/11, despite such tone-tempering directives, has not been a journalistic priority. Islam is 'a religion of peace,' as an early-October NBC News report declared, veiling its more violent and hegemonic faces.
A recent story in the New York Times announced that a high-ranking U.S. Army Muslim chaplain had been counseling Muslim soldiers that it was indeed morally right for them to fight and kill fellow Muslims from hostile nations. But the story neglected to bring the issue of Muslim servicemen's resistance to fighting fellow-Muslims down to the ground, by examining just how demoralizing and divisive the issue has been, and for quite some time — particularly in units where Muslims serve in any numbers, and where many commanders worry about ethnic insubordination. According to one Army chaplain I know, units with high percentages of Muslims, such as those that served in Bosnia and Kosovo, have been deeply polarized, with Muslim and non-Muslims lining up on very different sides of the barracks.
A sidebar story that could be done, but has not, has been the
significant underrepresentation of Muslims in the service. (According to the Pentagon, there are only 4000 Muslims in the entire armed forces.) This severe underrepresentation could serve as a journalistic springboard to discuss the problem of dual loyalty, or of Muslim resistance to 'Americanization' — but it has not.
The increase in anti-Muslim harassment is another area of significant
miscoverage. TOUGH BUT HOPEFUL WEEKS FOR THE MUSLIMS OF LARAMIE; ISOLATED FAMILY FINDS SUPPORT AND REASONS TO WORRY IN ILLINOIS; PARENTS FEAR THEIR CHILDREN WILL BE TARGETS OF BIGOTRY. In the six weeks since the attack, not a day passed that there was not some kind of major story in the New York Times highlighting victimized Middle-Easterners during this time of 'anti-Muslim fervor' (as Jodi Wilgoren of the Times called it), and the networks were quick to follow the Times' lead. Of course, the press is right to report on this problem, especially in the cases — few but fiendish — where hate crimes, including murder, have occurred. But even as news organizations report that the alleged wave of anti-Muslim violence is waning (Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, October 26), a very strong case could be made that the issue got far more attention than the evidence dictated, and that reporters were lax in verifying the stories of some presumed victims.
A mid-October Times story — 'Christian Arabs, Too, Are Harassed,' by Gustav Niebuhr — was built on nothing but claims of harassment, citing no police reports, and referenced the experience, relayed thirdhand, of one Arab teenager taunted at school for looking 'like Osama.' The piece actually closed with a quote from an Arab-American academic in Cleveland who noted that people have actually been more sympathetic to Arabs since the attack. This was a confusing and contradictory quote, at best, and made one wonder how closely the headline writer, under pressure to have the piece fit an approved script, actually read Niebuhr's copy. Another Times story, by Somini Sengupta, closed ominously with an anecdote, relayed secondhand, of an Indian-American her intermediary source said was 'chilled to the bone,' while parking his car, 'by a volley of threats and insults from a white man who had stepped out of his house' in New Jersey. A September 14 NBC story warned of a growing threat to Arab-Americans, but could only cite an incident in which a child was insulted on a playground.
Other harassment reports are pure 'crying wolf,' as in the case of Ahmad Saad Nasim, a student at Arizona State University. On September 13, Nasim claimed to have been attacked by a gang of white assailants who screamed, 'Die, Muslim die!' The claim was given considerable state and national media coverage, and resulted in more than 50 fearful Muslim students leaving the ASU campus. But when police questioned him after he was found bound and gagged in a university library, he confessed to having fabricated the first assault, and staging the library incident as well — a confession that got nowhere near the attention given the original 'hate' attack.
It is also hard to find credibility in media insistence on a national spasm of 'anti-Muslim fervor' when imams appear prominently, and disproportionately, at virtually every public memorial for the attack, from Washington's National Cathedral to New York's Yankee Stadium. Note, too, that the FBI has opened more than 100 hate-crime investigations into Muslim complaints — something it can ill afford to do at a time when its resources are stretched thin tracking terrorist suspects and stopping future attacks.
Somehow, in all this, we should also keep in mind that there were more Muslims killed in a single day of anti-U.S. riots in Pakistan (four) — and by other Muslims, than in the month following September 11 here.
The alleged erosion of constitutional protections — especially in the case of immigrant Arabs (legal and illegal) detained in the anti-terrorist crackdown — is another story slathered thick with PC pieties. As civil libertarians have pressed their case, they have often been echoed by news organizations, which have ignored important legal distinctions courts have affirmed between the rights of citizens and resident aliens and those of visa-holders and the undocumented. News organizations have also echoed complaints about 'racial profiling' of Middle Easterners, without which no real preventative screening can happen.
Indeed, stories about the supposed lack of effectiveness of the dragnet ('HUNDREDS OF ARRESTS, BUT PROMISING LEADS UNRAVEL — New York Times) might speak less to the fundamental innocence of the detainees than to the impossibility of fighting terrorist cells under the current legal rules of engagement, which bar interrogation tactics other nations can employ. As one assistant U.S. attorney lamented to me from the trenches: 'We're still following traditional criminal procedures and that's why we're not getting anywhere. We're just not set up for something like this.' Stories disparaging the dragnet's effectiveness also don't account for the fact that even with restrictive rules, the FBI believes it has disrupted several additional terrorist operations and might even be holding up to ten al Qaeda members.
Whether 9/11 should prompt a broad rewriting of immigration policy will be the subject of a fierce debate. The outcome is uncertain, though another big attack will undoubtedly favor restrictionists. But one thing is clear right now. The record shows that a PC lack of rigor, pre-9/11, undercut the watchdog role the press should have been playing on immigration. Despite the calamity that has befallen us, too much of a PC sensibility, and the victimology it encourages, endures.
|
|