(MintPress)— A family of five was among 20 civilians killed earlier this week in Afghanistan, after U.S. forces launched two separate air strikes and killed innocents.
A report on the story from American media plays up the fact that NATO – not the U.S., despite a brief mention of the attack being U.S.-led – is responsible, and affords little mention to the victims of the incident.
In contrast, a report from Afghani media provides a more in-depth account of who the victims were, detailing that five of those reportedly killed were children from the same family.
In comparing how the event was captured by mainstream American media versus the international community, one expert says that racism and imperialism play a role in how the story is told.
“Journalism in the mainstream is noticeably impotent at stepping back and critiquing the system,” says author and journalism professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Robert Jensen, “It’s well known that in the run up to the war in Iraq the U.S. media failed miserably to provide a check on government propaganda.” Jensen says the mainstream American media is again failing at its job to inform the public.
A tale of two stories
In examining coverage of the event from mainstream American media and comparing it to coverage in the international press, stark discrepancies can be found.
A report from the Washington Post on the incident begins with the lede, “NATO airstrikes killed Afghan civilians in two provinces, local officials reported Monday, and the U.S.-led coalition said it plans an apology in one of the incidents.”
The report then details, citing a provincial spokesman, that six members of one family in the Sangin area of southern Helmand province were killed and reasons that, “The strike was called in after insurgents attacked foreign and Afghan forces in the area.”
It adds briefly that “Helmand’s governor called the incident a mistake,” and also says “there were conflicting accounts on the number of deaths,” stemming from a similar incident that occurred in the same time frame in the Bala Murghab district of the Badghis province.
Another report on the same incident from the Pajhwok Afghan News website began “A mother and her five children were among 20 civilians killed in two separate air strikes in the southern Helmand and northwestern Badghis provinces.”
That report immediately details that “the incident took place late on Friday when an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) helicopter missed its target and dropped bombs on a house,” and says, “foreign forces killed a mother, her three daughters and two sons,” in reference to the Helmland attack.
Drone strikes draw increasing ire, but still lack coverage in mainstream media
Drone strikes, in and of themselves, have been drawing the attention and ire of a growing majority of Americans. Umar Farooq writes, “The fact is, there is almost no oversight or accountability over the drone strikes in America, and certainly none in Pakistan, rendering the term “civilian” entirely useless in the discussion of any legal, ethical or strategic appropriateness of the targeted killing campaign,” in a story written for Salon.
Farooq writes that more than 300 drone strikes have occurred in since 2004, and 266 under President Obama, but coverage of this issue is often overlooked, under-reported or glossed over in mainstream media. “The fact is,” Farooq writes of similar strikes in Pakistan, “the American and Pakistani publics are entirely ignorant of a drone strike in Pakistan until after it occurs, and then we have little more than rumors. The hundreds of plausible drone attacks in Pakistan are documented by a handful of Pakistani papers or international press agencies in articles that, once stripped of their veneer explaining the political sophistication of the issue, are hardly longer than a Craigslist posting announcing the street corner where you can pick up a used bicycle.”
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, thousands of people, many of them civilians, have been killed in U.S. sponsored drone strikes since 2001 in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
So why is the death of civilians in foreign countries either not reported, under-reported or glossed over in mainstream American media?
Racism and imperialism
Leading media expert Dr. Robert Jensen said in an interview with MintPress that there is more than one reason behind the way the mainstream media is covering issues such as drone strikes today.
“I think that there are two basic reasons: racism and imperialism,” he concluded.
In explaining his theory he clarified “By talking about racism I don’t mean that U.S. policy makers are overtly racist, but I do think that when the targets are non-white, it’s easier to mobilize it in a white supremacist society.”
Jensen says that a pervasive idea among Americans in general seems to be, “When you are killing Arabs and Afghans, who really cares?”
The way in which the media presents such news stories plays a role in this ideology, Jensen says, noting that many news reports portray people in such countries as Afghanistan and Pakistan as “primitive, tribal people.”
“When you start describing them that way you reduce them to a lesser status,” Jensen pointed out. Such reporting creates a dichotomy of “an us, the good U.S. people versus them, the strange tribal people” in the minds of American media consumers, he said. Coverage of these types of stories in American media are void of “any sense of shared suffering” and many Americans are encouraged to think “if you have to use drones that inevitably kill large numbers of people these are the techniques necessary.”
Constitutional and civil rights attorney and New York Times best-selling author Glenn Greenwold agrees that coverage of issues like the May drone strikes that killed civilians in Afghanistan are not adequately covered in American press.
Greenwold, who also won the first ever Izzy Award by the Park Center for Independent Media says,
“To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information.”
Jensen also says that “the U.S. is an imperial society, we fight imperial wars,” and “there’s something about the psychology” of this which leads Americans to hold a “belief in an inherent righteousness” of U.S. military actions.
“It’s part of a very successful propaganda campaign to keep people away from active engagement,” Jensen said.
He argues that since 9/11, the U.S. has fought with an internal mercenary Army, and “once the initial shock of 9/11 wore off the question became “how do you galvanize a public where the benefits of military activities go to the top one percent? How do you ask the general public to sacrifice for wars in which there’s no moral claim and little benefit for most?”
The U.S. spends “trillions of dollars a year to control what people think” he said. Part of the problem within an “overly corporate media system” lies with the way in which news is gathered. “You don’t really have independent journalism, as in independent from structures of power.”
Jensen, who teaches a course on Critical Issues in Journalism conveys that “the animating spirit of journalism in the modern world is a relentless focus on power.”
He challenges that journalists should “always be seeking self outside systems of power, and have the resources and freedom to act on that.”