Media defeat

By Mahmoud Khalil

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When Donald Rumsfeld comes on air to admit defeat in the media war against Al-Qaeda, you can't help but to think: the White House is reaching into its bag of tricks again. Still, there's a grain of truth in there. Bin Laden has had considerable success in taking on America's powerful multi- tentacled media machine.

In the late 1970s, Ayatollah Khomeini's use of the cassette tape in disseminating his calling was so effective in mobilising the Iranian people that their eventual overthrow of the shah in 1979 was dubbed "the cassette revolution". Osama Bin Laden took this lesson to heart and applied it to the media of his times -- the Internet and satellite television. He realised well how rival networks would scramble for a morsel of news, let alone a videotape here and there. He hit upon the up-and-coming Al-Jazeera, presented it with the prize of his videotaped addresses, and reached an audience in the Islamic world and abroad that few politicians could dream of.

This doesn't mean that Bin Laden's has defeated the mighty US media, which managed to rally opinion behind the war against terrorism and to capitalise on the image of Islam that Bin Laden and cohorts project. Where the US machine has failed is in its attempt to curb anti-American hatred in the Arab and Islamic worlds and project an image of the US as "saviour", dispelling the darkness of dictatorship for the light of freedom and democracy. This failure was inevitable given US aggression against the Iraqi people and its unmitigated pro-Israeli bias.

Rumsfeld, being Rumsfeld, is up to something. My guess is that he is frustrated at his inability to keep the resurfacing horrors of Abu Ghraib under wraps. He is saying there's an enemy out there who is unaccountable and spreads lies across the press, whereas the American government can barely move without the press jumping on its back. Is this a subtle way of telling the press to shut up, or what?

This week's Soapbox speaker is a professor of mass communication at Cairo. University.