Could
a news war between America and Iran become a physical war?
By Mahmood Ahmadi Afzadi
October 9, 2007
Fox
News says Iran should be bombed. This doesn’t surprise
me, given that channel’s track record in Iraq. What worries
me, however, is that the hawkish channel has just begun saying
that its drumbeat for war is a mere reflection of public opinion,
and not studio war mongering.
Based on a recent
poll by the channel, most Americans believe Iran’s
nuclear program is for military purposes. Furthermore, more
voters would rather see the United States take a tougher line
with Iran than a softer diplomatic path. “A tougher line”
is a euphemistic term for war.
But is its evidence really “documented”? I
have gone through its recent poll and found a few interesting
points. The timing of this poll is highly questionable; even
the network’s website admits that the poll’s coincidence
with “all the controversy over the Iranian president’s
visit to New York may have somewhat inflated feelings about
Iran”. The same poll at any other time could produce a
less war-supportive result.
Fox then asked if the viewers thought “al-Qaeda or Iran
pose the greatest threat to the safety of the United States
today”. The answers suggest that al-Qaeda is envisaged
as twice the threat as that of Iran. The milder anti-Iranian
result, however, is not reflected in the channel’s analysis,
which still insists on Iran’s clear and present danger.
The most elusive question posed in the poll is whether the visiting
Iranian president Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s intention to visit
Ground Zero was to honor the victims or the terrorists who killed
them. Regardless of what the real intention might have been,
how can any intention like that ever be discovered, much less
polled?
Furthermore, the majority of those asked said they thought Iran’s
uranium enrichment program was for military purposes and not
producing electricity. However, that falls short of suggesting
the viewers voted for a US bombing of Iran.
We can hardly hold Fox News responsible for a war that has not
yet happened. Whether or not the Bush administration will go
to war with Iran is still uncertain. But what is certain is
that the channel has practically raised the possibility of a
military encounter with Iran, simply because its anti-Iranian
antagonism spoken on behalf of the US people and government
is believed and taken seriously by the players at the other
end of the game: Iranians.
Thanks to its ability to arouse anti-American sentiments, Fox
News is now the most quoted American political source among
the hard-line Iranian media including the state-run radio and
television and the pro-government dailies, which are scrutinizing
every single minute of its programs in search of vilifications
of Iran.
Iranian state-run radio and television news have referred to
Fox News (which they call “the official organ of the Pentagon”)
94 times in the past two months as compared to 75 and 32 times
for Reuters and CNN in the same period respectively. And while
the latter two have, in more than 70 percent of the cases, been
referred to for news other than the US-Iranian standoff, Fox
News has been quoted or mentioned for vilifying Iran in each
and every one of those 94 cases.
The pro-government daily,Iran, has meanwhile reported on the network’s
provocative language more than other Iranian newspapers. Each
time Fox News is quoted with reference to a US confrontation
with the Islamic republic, the morning daily has run up to five
articles slamming the United States in the same edition, on
average a five-fold increase in its daily anti-American rhetoric.
Interestingly, the daily seems to be hardening its tone in proportion
to the tone and intensity of Fox News’s anti-Iranian reporting.
In its editorial one day after President Ahmadinejad’s
speech at Columbia University, Fox News was buzzing with anti-Iranian
sentiment, while Iran likened the standoff to “a
battle which will eventually result in a bloody American defeat.”
Such an explicit reference to war by an Iranian medium is still
rare, but the rhetoric is increasing as Fox’s does. It
was about this time in the lead-up to the Iraq war when the
other American networks started following Fox’s lead;
now it seems to be Iranian media that are following the network’s
style.
Spreading mutual hatred at this pace will undoubtedly contribute
to more tensions between the United States and Iran. A sentence
from Thomas Schelling’s wonderful cold war era book, Arms
and Influence, written in 1966, illuminates the present
situation: “The threat of war has always been somewhere
underneath international diplomacy, but for Americans [and I
would dare add Iranians] it is now much nearer the surface.”
At this precarious point in history, both Iranian and American
media would do well to reflect on how their reporting draws
the threat of war to the surface.
MAHMOUD AHMADI AFZADI has worked in
Iranian radio and television since 1992, reporting on events
like the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 1996, the killer earthquake
in the southern Iranian city of Bam in 2004, and the US invasion
of Iraq in 2003. He has also interviewed such politicians as
Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Benazir Bhuto and Mahmood Ahmadinejad.
He has been researching the Iranian nuclear issue since 2003.
He is currently studying at the University of B.C.'s Individual
Interdisciplinary Program.
