Network executives, who all agreed to review al-Qaeda tapes before airing any future clips, seem a lot more sensible than the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz or ABC's Ted Koppel.
In an online article on October 11, Kurtz offered an odd juxtaposition of the choice facing the networks: “On the one hand, you don't want to hand the White House a propaganda victory by imposing a blackout on the other side.” It's a Bush “propaganda victory” and not a concern that involves all Americans? The “other side”? That makes al-Qaeda no different in relation to Bush than Democrats who want a bigger prescription drug plan.
Kurtz opened his Thursday morning-posted online “Media Notes” column with the supposed conundrum facing the TV networks. An excerpt:
The journalistic decisions are getting tougher.
You're a network news boss. Condi Rice is on the phone. She wonders if, just possibly, you might consider doing the administration a favor: Stop running those Osama bin Laden videos, live and unedited.
There's a possibility the terrorist leader might be sending out coded messages to his followers.
Could you look at these tapes first, and maybe just run excerpts?
You think about it. On the one hand, you don't want to hand the White House a propaganda victory by imposing a blackout on the other side.
But what if there are coded messages? (Of course, how would you know?) You don't want to play into a murderer's hands. Although bin Laden could certainly get his message out through al-Jazeera television, the popular Arabic service (which is making as much as $20,000 a minute for hawking the Osama diatribes to the western media).
What to do? This is why you're paid the big bucks.
Fortunately, that wasn't a difficult choice for network executives. As Kurtz noted: “For ABC's David Westin, CBS's Andrew Heyward, NBC's Neal Shapiro, CNN's Walter Isaacson and Fox's Roger Ailes, it wasn't hard to agree that reviewing the videotapes first, rather than rushing them on the air unseen, might be the prudent course of action.”
Media Research Center analyst Jessica Anderson noticed that the night before, October 10, Koppel set up a Nightline story:
The White House is worried about coded messages buried in Osama bin Laden's videotaped diatribes and that we may, inadvertently, pass those messages on to covert cells watching our programs here in the United States, but those videotapes are satellited all over the world, including here, by an Arabic television station and they are all over the Internet already. They're easily accessible, in other words, even if they never appear on ABC or Fox or CNN.
But taking the videos off U.S. airwaves would make them less prevalent and harder to access.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)