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polls show the press enjoying unprecedented public approval. Ratings
have risen as high as 89 percent, in response to commendable reporting
on the World Trade Center attack, U.S. military actions in Afghanistan,
and the ongoing specter of bioterrorism, in which the media itself
has become a sympathetic victim.
But before
the pile of bouquets grows too high, maybe we should stop and pull
a flower or two from the stack.
Postmortem
analyses of the attack have pointed out significant weaknesses in
immigration policies and practices, which terrorists were able to
exploit to embed themselves in our society and operate below the
radar. Yet the journalistic establishment, too, bears some responsibility
for our unpreparedness on September 11. Viewing the issue of immigration
largely through rose-colored, ideological glasses, the press has
long given minimal attention to the many holes in the state and
federal immigration net. Though September 11 has indeed spurred
much of the media to better immigration reporting, there is still
considerable evidence of a politically correct mindset — one
largely reflected in the new solicitude toward Muslim and Arab immigrants
and the place of Islam in a multicultural America.
After the 1993
Trade Center bombing, U.S. officials overseas were supposed to tighten
screening procedures for visas issued to the more than 10 million
foreigners who apply for them annually. (Seven million — including
nine of the hijackers — got them.) But the screening system
is still spectacularly lax and badly run. Consular officers have
not had access to FBI criminal databases and face tremendous pressures
for fear of offending "the host country" by denying too
many applications. In some cases, much of the day-to-day work is
performed by non-American nationals in the embassy employ, their
loyalties uncertain. (This is distressingly so where 15 of the hijackers
came from: Saudi Arabia.) Intelligence, law enforcement, and immigration
reformers have been trying to draw attention to the disarray in
the visa-issuance system. But aside from the Washington Times,
database searches show a minimal press response — the watchdog
that did not bark.
There have
also been considerable weaknesses in the monitoring of visitors,
especially those using flights from Egypt and Saudi Arabia —
and the press seems uninterested here as well. For a decade, federal
officials have asked foreign airlines to electronically provide
passenger lists when planes begin flights to the U.S. These electronic
transmissions, called the Advance Passenger Screening System, allow
customs and immigration officers at points of arrival to get a head
start on checking names against watch lists of high-risk passengers
— a process that takes considerable time given the fragmentation
of various federal agencies' databases. Ninety-four foreign airlines
cooperate, but Egypt Air and Saudi Arabian Airlines have refused
to do so for years (and still do).
This is not
a small story, especially in light of the billions we give both
those countries, and how virulent their Muslim-fundamentalist problems
are. Yet a database search of the major newspapers reveals that
no attention was paid to this gap at all, unless you count a breezy
1997 New York Times travel-section piece aptly headlined
"Zipping Through Customs." Visa policies involving foreign
access to U.S. aviation also seem to have some glitches. Countries
like Syria are barred from landing their planes in the U.S. because
of their support for terrorism. Syrian pilots, however, can get
U.S. visas for purposes of taking private flight-school instruction.
But this situation, too, received no attention from any major American
news organization until FOX News reported it October 21 — another
revelatory "sin of omission."
Visa overstays
are another weak spot, both in terms of policies and press coverage.
The Immigration Reform Act of 1996 was supposed to introduce a tracking
system to match entries and exits (the number of overstays is estimated
at 2 million, growing by 125,000 every year). But Congress never
implemented that tracking system, and the few press reports that
addressed the issue gave prominence to minimizers, like the representative
from the American Immigration Lawyers Association who told Congress
recently that most overstays were "innocent" people spending
"an extra week at Disneyland."
News organizations
have also been remiss with respect to academic institutions' opposition
to a much-needed system for monitoring student visa holders. (There
are 500,000 foreign students in the country now, their exact whereabouts
untracked; according to officials, one hijacker had a visa to study
at a California Berlitz school but never showed up for class.) Many
of the universities that have objected to tracking have done so
because they don't want the bureaucratic hassles, because they fear
loss of revenue if foreign enrollments dip (foreign students often
pay full tuition), and because they feel that treating foreign students
differently from American citizens is stigmatizing and discriminatory.
This is a good story.
Another good
story is the intense bureaucratic warfare within the INS over the
failure to fund and implement this student-tracking program. But
again, on both of these angles, coverage was minimal and the stories
that did surface cast academic anti-border types in a positive light.
Coverage of
problems associated with illegal-immigrant access to state driver's
licenses and other documents has also been remiss. According to
authorities, many of the hijackers obtained multiple state driver's
licenses, using them to blend into society or to bolster false identities
that made them difficult for law enforcement to identify or track.
Yet when the subject of illegal-alien access to driver's licenses
got any press attention at all, most analyses presented it favorably
— as a way for illegals to connect to mainstream society and
economic opportunity, and as a way for them to feel more "personal
independence."
A New York
Times story about the situation in North Carolina, published
a month before 9/11, cheered liberal licensing policies as a sign
of illegal aliens' "increasing acceptance in society,"
and closed with a bit of victimology from an emissary of Mexican
President Vincente Fox, who scolded U.S. states that do not grant
licenses to illegal immigrants. "These are the people who are
building the roads in America," he said caustically of license-less
illegals. "But they're not allowed to drive on them."
A similar lack
of press scrutiny has extended to specialty licenses too, such as
the "hazardous material" (hazmat) permits the FBI now
believes several dozen suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants sought
through a Colorado truck-driving school. According to Time,
the men paid cash, and did not use the school's job-placement services
— an important aspect of the program's appeal. They also could
speak no English, relying on a translator they brought along, yet
somehow passed the state's hazmat written exam, which is given only
in English.
In a less politically
correct newsroom climate, a local or regional news organization
might have taken notice or at least given a second look to some
of the oddities involved here. But no notice was taken, and almost
two months after 9/11, authorities are still anxious that some of
the 30,000 hazmat trucks out there might be turned into rolling
bombs.
In the days
since the attack, almost all major newspapers and networks —
including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston
Globe, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, and NPR — have
played a fast game of catch-up, producing reports showing how lapses
in the immigration system, including several noted above, contributed
to the terrorists' effectiveness. Editorial writers at the New
York Times have even touted provisions of the 1996 Immigration
Reform Act that the paper had before broadly attacked — though
instead of admitting the Times's responsibility in helping
to neuter the 1996 law, the editorial page blamed "a lack of
collaboration between government agencies." The Times
is also now calling to increase security along our "porous
borders," after years of reporting and commentary shot through
with the assumption that illegal immigration was not such a big
deal. (New York Times Magazine: "What Immigrantion Crisis?")
But a reflexive,
pro-diversity newsroom climate survives, especially with respect
to post-9/11 coverage of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, who have become
the objects du jure of journalistic piety and skittishness. Although
many Muslim-Americans are appalled by the terrorist attack, a larger
proportion than has been admitted have expressed approval.
When stark
anti-American attitudes are highlighted, they're seen through
the lens of cultural relativism. Case in point: a recent New
York Times piece on attitudes of Muslim teenagers in a private
Islamic academy in Brooklyn. According to the reporter, Susan Sachs,
some of the Pakistani, Egyptian, Yemeni, and Palestinian immigrant
teens interviewed for this piece have little feeling toward their
new nation, and think the ideal society would follow Islamic law
and make no separation between religion and state. One 17-year-old
boy said he would support any leader he determined to be an observant
Muslim who was fighting for an Islamic cause, even if that meant
abandoning the U.S., or going to jail to avoid U.S. military service.
Other students expressed "empathy for the young Muslims around
the world who profess hated for America and Americans." Yet
instead of seeing such sentiments as worrying examples of dual loyalty
(i.e., no loyalty), Sachs tepidly described them as a sign
of "the strain" that immigrants and their children traditionally
can feel "between their adopted and native culture."
More active,
adult terrorist sympathizers have gotten easy treatment too. When
most of the prominent Muslims recently invited to the White House
were identified as known sympathizers with other terrorist causes
in the Middle East (The New Republic, October 15), the story
and its implications got little play. On October 19, the Times
made mention that pre 9-11 "incendiary anti-American messages"
were long a "staple" at some Muslim events, but added
that the attack had prompted influential Muslim-American clerics
to "temper their tone." But the story of incendiary rhetoric
should have been done long ago — and the ongoing militancy
of some of these clerics post-9/11, despite such tone-tempering
directives, has not been a journalistic priority. Islam is "a
religion of peace," as an early-October NBC News report declared,
veiling its more violent and hegemonic faces.
A recent story
in the New York Times announced that a high-ranking U.S.
Army Muslim chaplain had been counseling Muslim soldiers that it
was indeed morally right for them to fight and kill fellow Muslims
from hostile nations. But the story neglected to bring the issue
of Muslim servicemen's resistance to fighting fellow-Muslims down
to the ground, by examining just how demoralizing and divisive the
issue has been, and for quite some time — particularly in units
where Muslims serve in any numbers, and where many commanders worry
about ethnic insubordination. According to one Army chaplain I know,
units with high percentages of Muslims, such as those that served
in Bosnia and Kosovo, have been deeply polarized, with Muslim and
non-Muslims lining up on very different sides of the barracks.
A sidebar story
that could be done, but has not, has been the
significant underrepresentation of Muslims in the service. (According
to the Pentagon, there are only 4000 Muslims in the entire armed
forces.) This severe underrepresentation could serve as a journalistic
springboard to discuss the problem of dual loyalty, or of Muslim
resistance to "Americanization" — but it has not.
The increase
in anti-Muslim harassment is another area of significant
miscoverage. TOUGH BUT HOPEFUL WEEKS FOR THE MUSLIMS OF LARAMIE;
ISOLATED FAMILY FINDS SUPPORT AND REASONS TO WORRY IN ILLINOIS;
PARENTS FEAR THEIR CHILDREN WILL BE TARGETS OF BIGOTRY. In the six
weeks since the attack, not a day passed that there was not some
kind of major story in the New York Times highlighting victimized
Middle-Easterners during this time of "anti-Muslim fervor"
(as Jodi Wilgoren of the Times called it), and the networks
were quick to follow the Times' lead. Of course, the press
is right to report on this problem, especially in the cases —
few but fiendish — where hate crimes, including murder, have
occurred. But even as news organizations report that the alleged
wave of anti-Muslim violence is waning (Washington Post and
Los Angeles Times, October 26), a very strong case could
be made that the issue got far more attention than the evidence
dictated, and that reporters were lax in verifying the stories of
some presumed victims.
A mid-October
Times story — "Christian Arabs, Too, Are Harassed,"
by Gustav Niebuhr — was built on nothing but claims of harassment,
citing no police reports, and referenced the experience, relayed
thirdhand, of one Arab teenager taunted at school for looking "like
Osama." The piece actually closed with a quote from an Arab-American
academic in Cleveland who noted that people have actually been more
sympathetic to Arabs since the attack. This was a confusing and
contradictory quote, at best, and made one wonder how closely the
headline writer, under pressure to have the piece fit an approved
script, actually read Niebuhr's copy. Another Times story,
by Somini Sengupta, closed ominously with an anecdote, relayed secondhand,
of an Indian-American her intermediary source said was "chilled
to the bone," while parking his car, "by a volley of threats
and insults from a white man who had stepped out of his house"
in New Jersey. A September 14 NBC story warned of a growing threat
to Arab-Americans, but could only cite an incident in which a child
was insulted on a playground.
Other harassment
reports are pure "crying wolf," as in the case of Ahmad
Saad Nasim, a student at Arizona State University. On September
13, Nasim claimed to have been attacked by a gang of white assailants
who screamed, "Die, Muslim die!" The claim was given considerable
state and national media coverage, and resulted in more than 50
fearful Muslim students leaving the ASU campus. But when police
questioned him after he was found bound and gagged in a university
library, he confessed to having fabricated the first assault, and
staging the library incident as well — a confession that got
nowhere near the attention given the original "hate" attack.
It is also
hard to find credibility in media insistence on a national spasm
of "anti-Muslim fervor" when imams appear prominently,
and disproportionately, at virtually every public memorial for the
attack, from Washington's National Cathedral to New York's Yankee
Stadium. Note, too, that the FBI has opened more than 100 hate-crime
investigations into Muslim complaints — something it can ill
afford to do at a time when its resources are stretched thin tracking
terrorist suspects and stopping future attacks.
Somehow, in
all this, we should also keep in mind that there were more Muslims
killed in a single day of anti-U.S. riots in Pakistan (four) —
and by other Muslims, than in the month following September 11 here.
The alleged
erosion of constitutional protections — especially in the case
of immigrant Arabs (legal and illegal) detained in the anti-terrorist
crackdown — is another story slathered thick with PC pieties.
As civil libertarians have pressed their case, they have often been
echoed by news organizations, which have ignored important legal
distinctions courts have affirmed between the rights of citizens
and resident aliens and those of visa-holders and the undocumented.
News organizations have also echoed complaints about "racial
profiling" of Middle Easterners, without which no real preventative
screening can happen.
Indeed, stories
about the supposed lack of effectiveness of the dragnet ("HUNDREDS
OF ARRESTS, BUT PROMISING LEADS UNRAVEL — New York Times)
might speak less to the fundamental innocence of the detainees than
to the impossibility of fighting terrorist cells under the current
legal rules of engagement, which bar interrogation tactics other
nations can employ. As one assistant U.S. attorney lamented to me
from the trenches: "We're still following traditional criminal
procedures and that's why we're not getting anywhere. We're just
not set up for something like this." Stories disparaging the
dragnet's effectiveness also don't account for the fact that even
with restrictive rules, the FBI believes it has disrupted several
additional terrorist operations and might even be holding up to
ten al Qaeda members.
Whether 9/11
should prompt a broad rewriting of immigration policy will be the
subject of a fierce debate. The outcome is uncertain, though another
big attack will undoubtedly favor restrictionists. But one thing
is clear right now. The record shows that a PC lack of rigor, pre-9/11,
undercut the watchdog role the press should have been playing on
immigration. Despite the calamity that has befallen us, too much
of a PC sensibility, and the victimology it encourages, endures.
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