Less press, one to 10

Three press stories recently speak to the same theme: less media coverage or (much the same thing) less editorial variety. All three bode ill for public awareness: the first in one region of Afghanistan, the second about Afghanistan in general, and the third regarding Afghanistan’s supposed liberator and would-be benefactor, the United States of America.

All three are worrisome. How worried should we be about each?

Consider first the situation in Herat, Afghanistan’s westernmost city and personal fiefdom of self-styled Amir (commander) Ismail Khan. While Afghans everywhere suffer from a lack of deeply rooted institutions, inhabitants of Herat and its environs enjoy at least a semblance of peace, security and predictability. They start each day with what some would call a basic human right: the fair assurance that day’s end will find them, thanks to Ismail Khan, alive and unmolested. No small thing after 25 years of mayhem.

The amir, by Western standards, is most certainly high-handed. While in Kabul three months ago, I heard much pious complaint over Ismail Khan’s chasing a young Afghan reporter from Herat. The reporter, named Ahmed Behzad, had criticized the amir on U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Afghanistan. Then he’d cornered the new interior minister (himself a former Voice of American staffer) at a Herat reception, posed provocative questions in a narrow passage-way, and thereby (perhaps most dangerous of all) blocked Ismail Khan and his entourage from getting to the food. The amir told him to leave. My Kabul friends, many of them recently returned Afghans and all of them protected from chaos by the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF), regarded the banishment of Behzad as a crime against freedom.

Legitimate outrage? Maybe but note that (because of U.S. opposition) ISAF does not function in Herat. The city’s security depends entirely on Ismail Khan. His take in a recent interview: “Our brothers from the West have seen Afghanistan from far away. I see it clearly. Our country is completely different from those that are 100 years ahead of us. The freedom these Afghans from the West have seen is not suitable for here.”

What’s your take? How troublesome (scale of one-to-10) is Ismail Khan’s treatment of Ahmed Behzad?

Situation Two deals with a broader issue: press coverage of Afghanistan in general. Here I quote extensively from “Whatever Happened to Afghanistan” by Lori Roberts in the May 31 issue of American Journalism Review.

The article begins anecdotally with leads from the Baltimore Sun (“Remember Afghanistan? Anybody?”) and Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News (“In the all-but-forgotten war in Afghanistan …”). That’s the tone. Here come the statistics:

TV coverage is measured by the Tyndall report. In January 2002, “the network’s weekday nightly newscasts aired a total of 106 minutes on Afghanistan. This January the count was down to 11 minutes. In March it was a mere 60 seconds.” A year ago Kabul crawled with TV crews. Now CNN is the sole U.S. network with a team on the ground. (When I last visited its Kabul digs, CNN’s beer was still cold and its stories still hot.)

U.S. newspaper coverage is apparently harder to quantify, “but a search of Lexis-Nexis stories with a dateline of ‘Afghanistan’ produces some interesting results. From January through the end of April 2002, a search nets a trove of stories that Lexis-Nexis considers too large to display (at least 1,000). A year later, from January through April 2003, there were 167 stories.” More than half of these appeared in two papers: The New York Times and the Washington Post. Only the Post keeps a staffer (the excellent Pamela Constable) in Afghanistan full-time.

What to make of this decline? “We could,” writes Ms. Roberts, “take a glass-half-full attitude…. After all, very few news organizations had any kind of presence in Afghanistan prior to September 11, and here we are, a year and eight months later, with some still hanging in.” She notes that Afghan news, while harder to find, is still available on distant cyber horizons. And that a similar fall from prominence overtook “any number of former hotspots – Somalia, Panama, Colombia, Rwanda, Iraq after the first gulf war–countries that quickly faded from the news or hardly made the headlines in the first place.”

But this journalistic glass may, in fact, be half-empty. Roberts suggests that Afghanistan is different: “the first stop in the lengthy war on terrorism, [where] the United States (with more than 9,000 troops still there) has made a commitment to rebuilding the country. Whether that commitment is fulfilled, and how well Afghanistan is able to recover from 20-plus years of conflict, has long-term ramifications for possible terrorist attacks against the U.S., the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and rage against America, and the stability of the region.”

How does the glass look to you? How worrisome (again on a one-to-ten scale) is this shrinkage of coverage on Afghanistan?

Situation three is home-grown: our government’s decision early this month to allow greater media consolidation – not in far-away Afghanistan, but in the USA. In a narrow and acrimonious vote, the Federal Communications Commission eased limits on conglomerate purchases of local TV stations. And now, for the first time in 28 years, a newspaper can run a radio or TV station in the same city.

Seem boringly legalistic, too fine print to warrant attention? Ask this question: How do you know what you know?

Answer: Beyond first-hand experience, we’re all dependent on the news media. It tells us A) What topics merit our attention in the first place and B) What’s known about those topics. As long as media is various in ownership and diverse in opinion, we’ll have a choice…and thus a chance to decide for ourselves.

But what happens when media is monopolized? Tampa, Fla., may hint at our future. Its banner news two weeks ago, the same time as this FCC decision, featured the marital difficulties of a professional football player. The same news – written by the same reporter – was ballyhoo-ed in the Tampa Tribune, the Tribune’s web site, TV station WFLA’s web site, and on another local outlet called TBO.com. Reason: All these are owned by Media General Inc. of Richmond, Virginia.

I “know” of this Tampa story thanks to the Washington Post, which ran it, and to Charles Campo, chief librarian of the Bangor Daily News, who found it for me. The Post is big enough to have its own conglomerate underway. The Daily News is brave enough to remain independent.

The FCC vote came along party lines with Republican commissioners outnumbering Democrats 3-2. It’s heartening, therefore, to note the independence of Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine). The changes, she said, “will undermine the basic tenets of democracy and objectivity in reporting and may have long-term consequences in terms of public access to information.”

How does this FCC decision, less newsworthy in Tampa than a case of minor celebrity domestic discord, seem to you on a one-to-10 scale of concern?

Me, I’m not much bothered by Ismail Khan’s restrictions on free press in Herat. Give the guy credit for providing peace in the absence of established institutions. Give his media misdemeanor a “1.”

Me, I’m far more concerned by the decline in Afghanistan coverage. That country – rather than Iraq on which Bush & Co. hoodwinked the American people – remains our most active and authentic battleground in the War on Terror. We need to know what’s happening there. Give this shortage of news at least a “5.”

Most of all – like Sen. Snowe – I’m troubled by the FCC decision. Too much of American media has already shown itself complacent and complicit in swallowing, then regurgitating the Bush “Axis of Evil” pathology. We need independence of opinion. Give its reduction by the FCC a “10.”

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.