People watch smoke from an airstrike by the US-led coalition rising outside Kobani, Syria, from a hilltop on the outskirts of Suruc, at the Turkey-Syria border, on October 23. (AP Photo / Vadim Ghirda)
In the months since ISIS beheaded two American journalists and released the video tapes for all the world to see, there have been reports of shadowy new terrorist cells in Syria, lone wolf attacks in the West, and the progress of the US-led airstrikes.
These reports belong to a larger narrative that is changing week to week, sometimes day to day, yet its pattern and tone are familiar. Driven by a national outcry over the gruesome beheadings, the news media has focused on threats at home and abroad, while invoking the comforting myth of America’s military prowess. Like the media coverage that led up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, much of it is based on official, often anonymous sources, and a startling lack of evidence.
“We read the same things, we heard the same things about Al Qaeda,” said Yahya Kamalipour, who chairs the journalism department at North Carolina A&T State University, and the author of US Media and the Middle East: Image and Perception. “[ISIS] is an outcome of that really fundamentalist group, that’s my point. The situation is not getting any better; it’s like a feedback loop.”
Like the media coverage that led up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, much of it is based on official, often anonymous sources, and a startling lack of evidence.
Twelve years ago, the media coverage that led up to the war in Iraq marched in step with an administration that was eager to go to war. Today, “Threats and Responses,” the 2002 article in which Michael Gordon and Judith Miller claimed that the purchase of aluminum tubes was evidence that Saddam Hussein had a cache of nuclear weapons, has become a touchstone example of the failure of the press. The wrong piece at the right time, it helped the administration justify war in a moment when the American public was reeling from 9/11.
This summer, the videotaped beheadings of the American journalists inflicted their own kind of trauma, especially on the journalism community. The image of James Foley, kneeling in the desert, a knife against his neck, cannot be unseen. William Youmans, who teaches media and public affairs at George Washington University, worries that the outrage it sparked has given way to the same sort of solipsistic nationalism that transfixed the media in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He wonders what, if anything, has changed.
“There was a great deal of soul searching after the widely repeated, uncritical coverage leading up to the Iraq war,” Youmans said. “But I don’t know if that soul searching resulted in any fundamental changes in the relationship between the media and the political elite.”
The recent coverage suggests that this relationship is as close as ever. In the same week that Obama announced an open-ended bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the AP reported that a new terrorist cell had emerged that posed an even “more direct and imminent threat to the United States” than ISIS, in the form of the Khorasan group. With Obama administration officials publicly touting the group, the story flared through broadcasts and headlines on CBS and The New York Times, which quoted the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., as saying that “in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State”–despite there being almost no public information about Khorasan, or any concrete evidence as to who might belong to it. Two days later the first bombs fell in Syria.
Then in October the media glommed onto reports from law enforcement and terrorism officials that a series of violent episodes–including a slashing in Queens, a shooting in Ottawa, and a murder plot in Australia–may be evidence of ISIS’s capacity to catalyze terror attacks in the West. With congressional leaders calling for the military and police to be on guard, The Wall Street Journal described the attackers as “growing in number” and “hard to defend against.” CNN compared them to the shoe-bomber and other “lone wolves,” all of them Muslim, who had been self-radicalized in the West. Fox News called the American people “sitting ducks.” As was the case with the Khorasan group, the lone wolf threat was not based on evidence. Instead, it was based on messages that had appeared on Islamic State web forums urging “lone wolves in America” to plant explosives and target police.
Now that 1,500 additional US troops have been deployed to Iraq, a stunning development for an administration that had promised to drawdown the US presence there, it’s the coverage of the airstrikes themselves that is dominating the news. And with Khorasan largely debunked–by publications as diverse as Foreign Policy, the National Review, and The Intercept–and the threat of the lone wolf wiped from the headlines (Gawker had called it a “fairy tale”), a number of experts are wondering who exactly is driving the story.
According to Steve Livingston, a media scholar at George Washington University, media coverage since the Vietnam war has tended to privilege official sources, especially from the White House. “News coverage of war and foreign policy is indexed to the limited range of elite opinions,” he says, “at least in the short run.”
Lee Artz, who teaches communications at Purdue University, and the author of Public Media and Public Interest and Cultural Hegemony in the United States, said he sees these findings reflected in the constantly shifting narrative about the Islamic State. “The mainstream media in the US tends to accept uncritically whatever the US administration releases,” he says. “ISIS has been around for years, but according to the US it didn’t pose any threat to Western civilization until this summer. And then when the bombing campaign begins against ISIS, suddenly this group Khorasan appears as a more immediate threat, a more dangerous threat, although there wasn’t any background to it.” Artz says the threats that drew us into the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and Iraq in 2003, were similar. “In each case, intervention began with some threat that turned out to be convenient and useful to the US policy of intervention.”
A fog of information contributes to the problem. ISIS’s campaign of violence has made it all but impossible for American journalists to report on the ground in Iraq and Syria. And even though there are plenty of voices that are critical of the recent ISIS narrative, those voices aren’t reaching the majority of Americans, who get their news through national cable TV, and whose awareness of news sources is split along partisan lines. Youmans believes there’s still a shortage of sound international reporters and people who know the region very well, and that increased collaboration between Arab and American journalists could help enrich the national conversation.
A documentary released by Vice, in which reporter Medyan Dairieh embedded with the Islamic State for three weeks, is one recent example. The documentary sparked controversy for giving a voice to the jihadists, for its graphic, gruesome footage, and for possibly being illegal. But the reporter’s methods also captured the nuances of how the IS operates within the context of the region, in relation to other states, and its success in rooting out corruption in local markets–nuances that rarely surface in mainstream news outlets because they remain unknown, or do not fit the narrative. Youmans does not defend what the IS stands for, but says he is disturbed by the lack of nuance in much of the current reporting. “When the media starts erasing the bad things that good people do, and the good things that bad people do, that’s how we know it’s an information war.”
For now, without the benefit of hindsight, the recent coverage of ISIS and the airstrikes may only be notable for revealing just how little is actually known. Last week’s reports that the airstrikes were working have given way to doubt. Targets and alliances are shifting. Reports that US planes were passing through Syrian airspace and conspicuously not being shot at left many wondering whose side the US is on. This week, both The Washington Post and The New York Times ran pieces on the obstacles that are preventing the airstrikes from being more effective: Citing official and anonymous sources, the Post piece was framed around whether or not a key IS leader had been killed; the Times described the bad weather, a lack of intelligence, and an inability to locate targets, positing that ISIS had gone underground. The Times piece appeared alongside another one by Ben Hubbard, who wrote that “the news media in general had perhaps given the impression that [ISIS] was stronger and more powerful than it actually is.” Given the story he wrote last week, it almost seemed like an apology.
The reversals struck Artz as curious. “They send out bombing raids but they can’t find anybody to bomb. And again, this is the front page of The New York Times. So where’s the existential threat?” Meanwhile, a toolkit for journalists covering the airstrikes appeared on journalistresource.org. Complete with lessons from previous conflicts, including new data-driven research on how the bombings of civilian areas during the Vietnam war “systematically shifted control in favor of the Viet Cong insurgents,” the toolkit’s mission was clear: Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Damaris Colhoun is CJR’s digital correspondent covering the media business. A reporter at large in New York, Colhoun has also written for The Believer, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Atlas Obscura. Find her on Twitter @damarisdeere.