Media Musings: Meaningful coverage needed
We well may be beyond the easy questions now about the brutal attacks of Sept. 11 and need to see our journalism begin to move into difficult, troubled waters and explore one of the oldest parts of reporting: Why did this terror attack occur?
You can run and look for easy answers and avoid even asking such a question, but that is not what major media not only should explore, but must explore to prepare us for the terrorist attacks that are as sure to come as the changing of the leaves in the Great Smoky Mountains.
It took great intellectual courage, research and care to craft what I consider to be one of the best efforts to date to approach a topic no other network except the Public Broadcasting Service would do: Where was God on Sept. 11?
Some no longer view God as a benevolent force. Others no longer pray. Others deny God had anything to do with the tragedy. Some say we should work to understand evil. Some do not believe in evil. Some became deeply religious and serious about their lives and search for hope.
The power is in the visual presentation of course, and the show has web discussion sites available along with more interviews about religious diversity and the need for interfaith dialogue.
This is sensitive journalism and isn’t the first time PBS ventured into religion. The week after 9/11 Bill Moyers, a Baptist minister and the most thoughtful TV journalist in the nation, did several nights of interviews with the leaders of the world’s great religions to seek out what we should make of this attack on us by the fundamentalist side of a great religion. It’s important to remember the vast majority of the followers of Islam say the attack was done by men using religion as a shield covering their hatred of the West.
This was echoed on “60 Minutes” when a former member of Congress, a long-time student and activist in the affairs of Afghanistan, gave the same answer: They hate us because the West won the struggle for wealth, and power, and ideas. Even if you buy that argument, it is too simple to be a total answer.
Being generous about it, the truth is fundamentalist Islamic developments happen in very repressive regimes (Egypt, Saudi Arabia come to mind) where the hope for freedom and economic opportunity are no longer there. The massive number of young college graduates in Saudi Arabia have no hope of jobs upon graduation and end up doing menial labor. That is a wonderful seedbed for those who want to overthrow the House of Saud and become a fundamentalist nation.
The publications trying to gather better insight into the “Why Question” have been small journals with limited resources giving voice to intellectuals and others who study and understand the complexities of the Middle East especially. They have tiny readerships but are vital to working us through this sad and scary time.
That means the best journalism being practiced is being done on a network and for publications that have small, elite viewerships. The major media, especially television, can do such work but have fallen into a death struggle over sensational, shout-journalism where five people yell and cry and do hardball and you don’t learn a thing after you have been entertained.
They have made both talk radio and cable news often wastelands where attack journalism is practiced and no light of ideas ever appears. They are the dark holes of dialogue, reason and thought. They provide only the same manta, from James Carville to Phil Donahue, five nights a week in a endless loop.
We need to abandon them and they will die with the arrow of low ratings in their pointed heads. Then there can be room for work to complement our national leader in TV journalism: PBS.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)