Casualty of War: the Bush Administration's Assault on a Free Press.

• Author: Ramsey, Bruce
• Position: Book Review

Casualty of War: The Bush Administration's Assault on a Free Press. By David Dadge Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004. Pp. 349. $26.00.

Casualty of War is a narrative of the obstacles and intimidations that the American press suffered after the al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001. David Dadge, editor at the International Press Institute in Vienna, takes a professionally partisan view. Journalists, he writes, should be "free of all constraints whether political, social or emotional" (p. 113). After 9/11, they faced many such constraints, which he names. How one takes his book, however, will depend on how one evaluates those constraints and how one evaluates the war.

Consider first the constraints. Some are of ownership, including government ownership. One story Dadge tells, occurring several years before the 9/11 attacks, involves the U.S. government's effort to secure the release of Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. Part of the deal with China was that the U.S. government would not make political hay of the release. After Wei was allowed to leave China, the Voice of America (VOA) announced an interview with him in its overseas Mandarin service. The State Department tried to stop the broadcast. Dadge thinks this interference was indefensible because it turned the VOA into "the microphone of the federal government" (p. 20). But the VOA is part of the U.S. government. It is State Radio, and the government of China is not unreasonable to see it that way. Indeed, after 9/11, the U.S. government explicitly saw it that way. On February 25, 2002, President George W. Bush said, "The Voice of America is not neutral between America and America's enemies" (p. 39).

One constraint on the private media is government moral suasion, which can be powerful in times of crisis. After the 9/11 attacks, the president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, asked for a conference call with U.S. television network executives. She implored them not to broadcast Osama bin Laden tapes in full because his rhetoric might inflame Muslims and because the tapes might contain coded messages to al Qaeda cells. After making this request, she got off the line, leaving the media executives to discuss it. They agreed to cooperate. Dadge writes, "It was the first time in modern memory that the news networks had consulted each other on policy" (p. 81).

Another case of influence was in reaction to a statement made by comedian Bill Maher. On the Politically Incorrect...