No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11 (Democracy and the News) [Hardcover]

Lisa Finnegan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0275993353 | ISBN-13: 978-0275993351 | Publication Date: November 30, 2006

No Questions Asked takes an overarching view of media coverage from the day of the 9/11 attacks through the war in Iraq. It also compares and contrasts how the U.S. media vs. international media covered key events during this period. Fact-based rather than polemical, the book explains why journalists responded the way they did during wartime and explores the ramifications for democracy of a weak press.

The Fourth Estate's most important job is to present unbiased, accurate information about events, issues, and policies to the public. Without public scrutiny, administrations can become a breeding ground for bad and dangerous ideas.

In recent years, for several reasons—including the brilliant psychological manipulation of the nation after the September 11, 2001, attacks—the American media have allowed administration officials to present information to the public without having to worry much about answering uncomfortable questions or having their policies deconstructed for public consumption. Relevant information is buried deep inside newspapers, and gaping holes can be found in many stories; in short, obvious and important questions remain unasked.

The lack of questions from reporters led to a misunderstanding of the facts by the American public and, consequently, to their support of policies based on misinformation. Polls have revealed that more than half of Americans believe mistruths about the war in Iraq and world terrorism. Many, including members of the media, say the press has failed to do its job. Very few news reports filled in the basic blanks—the who, what, where, when, and whys—about U.S. foreign policy, the USA Patriot Act, the administration's insistence on the need for secrecy and more power, the truth about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the necessity of sending our soldiers to topple another country's dictator, throwing an already tenuous region into dangerous imbalance. Very few reports are filling in those blanks now.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

With the passage of time, it has become more and more apparent how the American press failed to question the Bush administration response to the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., according to independent journalist Finnegan, who explores those failures and what they may have cost the nation. Fear of being perceived as unpatriotic and willingness to accept information doled out by the administration led many journalists to retreat from their responsibility to question policies on the war on terror. The administration was not adequately probed on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the need to topple Saddam Hussein, and the Patriot Act and a host of other policies that have been set in place since 9/11. Finnegan describes the buildup to war and the psychological manipulation the administration used on the public and the press. Finnegan also compares U.S. coverage of 9/11 and the war on terror and coverage by the press abroad. This is a penetrating look at American news coverage at a critical time in U.S. history. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"With the passage of time, it has become more and more apparent how the American press failed to question the Bush administration response to 9/11 attacks on the U.S., according to independent journalist Finnegan, who explores those failures and what they may have cost the nation. Fear of being perceived as unpatriotic and willingness to accept information doled out by the administration led many journalists to retreat from their responsibility to question policies on the war on terror. The administration was not adequately probed on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the need to topple Saddam Hussein, and the Patriot Act and a host of other policies that have been set in place since 9/11. Finnegan describes the build-up to war and the psychological manipulation the administration used on the public and the press….This is a penetrating look at American news coverage at a critical time in U.S. history."

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Booklist

"While many commentators have drawn connections between the miserably uncritical treatment of the Bush administration by the media following the September 11th attacks and the ability of the administration to initiate the invasion and occupation of Iraq based on nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally nonexistent ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, fewer have sought to map out the entire American media landscape in the era of the War on Terror, as independent journalist Finnegan does here. The picture that emerges is, if anything, worse, with even the self-bestowed accolades for the media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina withering under scrutiny. Beyond criticizing the structural and cultural factors that preclude media skepticism towards the powerful, she also documents the many ways that the American media has come to serve essentially as a propaganda organ for government."

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Reference & Research Book News

"^INo Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11^R surveys the American media and its manipulation post-9/11, considering how the facts were misunderstood by the American public due to the lack of the right questions from reporters, and pinpointing mistruths about the war in Iraq and the nature of the threat of world terrorism. An eye-opening survey of democratic process and news reporting emerges which holds particular impact and importance for any college-level library strong in media studies."

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Midwest Book Review - California Bookwatch

"^INo Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11^R is a clear-headed, methodical exposition on the medias failings since that fateful day….Finnegans unique perspective is that she approaches her subject matter as a journalist who earned a masters degree in educational psychology after the events of Sept. 11. But while the blending of these perspectives provides an academic frame for her understanding of the psychology of terrorism and how it affects the media, its Finnegans working knowledge of journalists and their group-think tendencies that enables her to connect the dots in so devastating a fashion. Reading ^INo Questions Asked^R is a sobering task, and one that should be required of any aspiring journalist before he or she takes on the mantle."

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The Newspaper Guild

"Many others have documented the press' letdown in fulfilling its adversarial role after 9/11. Seeing the problem is easy. Explaining it is harder. So Finnegan's rather studious approach, drawing on individual and group psychology, holds promise for not only understanding the failures but pointing toward reforms….Her suggestions boil down to detachment and determination: Ask hard questions, pursue documentation, seek comments outside the party line and follow up on loose ends and claims. It seems like pretty good psychology: Just use your head."

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American Journalism Review

"Finnegan's convincing, readable, and meticulously researched book concerns the failure of the US press to adequately cover real news since the 9/11 attacks. Conservatives will probably accuse Finnegan (an award-winning journalist and a scholar of the psychology of terrorism and the media) of a liberal bias in maintaining that the Bush administration and Fox News bullied a compliant media into censoring key news stories and printing pro-administration propaganda pieces. But no one can deny that the alarming evidence Finnegan presents in support of that contention is well documented and raises questions that need to be asked. This book is more substantive than some other books on the subject (Bernard Goldberg's work comes to mind), many of which are underresearched and rancorous in their attempts to expose the media as liberal, and it is easier to read than David Barker's heavily footnoted, statistic-laden Rushed to Judgment (2002), which argues that the media are 6rnservative. Although the debate over whether the media is fundamentally left- or right-wing may never be settled, Finnegan addresses the controversy with a minimum of snarkiness and moral outrage and a preponderance of facts and intelligent analysis. Essential. All readers; all levels."

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Choice

"Finnegan's basic argument is that the American media have been largely responsible for such misperceptions because they have failed to maintain an independent, critical position in relation to 11 September, the war on terror, and the current Bush administration more generally. Her aim is thus to present examples of these failings, which she does to great effect by examining how various major American newspapers and television networks have covered news items ranging from the allied bombings of Afghanistan, to the effects of the USA Patriot Act (2001), to aspects of the war in Iraq….and on to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina….[T]he fact that she is able to build such a convincing argument about the malaise of media freedoms in America by drawing on reports from the media itself is testament to her skill in closely probing and contrasting particular media reports. It also shows that there are still flashes of good, critial life in the American media yet."

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Journal of American Studies

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Praeger (November 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0275993353
• ISBN-13: 978-0275993351
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,010,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How do you fix a broken mirror?, January 12, 2007

By 

George F. Simons "at diversophy.com" (Mandelieu Napoule, Cote d'Azur, France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11 (Democracy and the News) (Hardcover)

Even before 9/11, I had been increasingly disturbed by the disconnection between the reporting of news in the USA and what I receive via my satellite connection from France, Germany and elsewhere. In the post 9/11 world, the gap in factual reporting and astute interpretation between US media and much of the rest of the world became positively bizarre. What could explain this cultural shift in news reporting, this apparent decay of the US Fourth Estate?

Lisa Finnegan has squarely addressed my bewilderment in her new book, No Questions Asked, itself an excellent example of reportage. The title says it all. In the fallout from 9/11 reporters and news analysts stopped asking questions. Better to say, they stopped asking hard questions, they stopped asking follow-up questions, they stopped asking embarrassing questions.

Why? Finnegan cites and documents the reasons and the trends.

Patriotism and groupthink. US Americans and their news reporters like much of the rest of the population were emotionally overwhelmed by the events of 9/11. They lost it, so to speak when it came to examining the causes, hard facts and political motivations surrounding this unheard of attack on the US homeland. Once lost, independence of perspective was next to impossible to regain. A quagmire of unqualified patriotism and groupthink suffocated independant thinking and inquiry. Under stress, the culture had shifted to blind survival values. Dissent, when not attacked as treason, was dismissed or omitted was slightly reported and relegated to the back pages. The media willingly and even eagerly accepted direction from the government on what to write and not write. Being the government's mouthpiece was suddenly a virtuous thing to do.

Growing media monopoly. The culture of newsmaking and news selling had been in a process of transformation and consolidation. Media giants and moguls left little room for independent thinking when the emphasis is on profits in an enviornment of political, competitive and advertising pressures. Embarrassing questions sap power and cost money, as they often inquire into power and money. Cost cutting reduces time and resources for free and first hand investigation. Corporate and editorial policies are aligned to sell what they think people want to hear. They must bow to public opinion and so it is extremely important that they create it favorable to themselves. Post 9/11 reporting became a tug of war between broadcasting insecurity and promising security in the form of clear, easy answers. It delivered the poison and gave the recipe for the antidote in the same paragraph.

Gentrification of the newsroom. Finnegan also shows how news reporters themselves had changed culturally and socially. Through the first half of the 20th Century, US news reporters seemed to largely stem from the US working classes, with strong connections to the mainstream of the time, and possessed of considerable street sense. They smelled and instinctively distrusted political and corporate interests. Today many successful college educated writers and anchors have moved into upper class wealth and have few if any first hand experiences of the realities they could and should in many instances be reporting.

Tailor made news. Add to this, the "selling of the war." Vast sums of public money have been used to hire public relations firms and professionals to not only spin the political priorities of the Bush administration but to actually write the news reports and articles to be distributed to media both home and abroad.

Sacrificing objectivity for access. Few of us with outside perspectives could resist the temptation to replace "embedded" with "in bed with" when discussing the construction of war reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reporters all but became part of the US military itself, while "unilaterals," independently moving reporters were excluded and even fired upon by US forces. US Americans got to see a sanitized version of the war, which, as Finnegan points out in a magnificent metaphor, amounted to "seeing the war through a soda straw." Foreign media and direct footage were carefully filtered and censored and the costs of the war in US and other casualties were deemed uninteresting. On the political scene access to administration news conferences was restricted to those who asked safe questions--troublemakers lost their credentials and were isolated from news sources. Language is continually reinvented to mask unpleasant realities. Collateral damage, insurgent, and the like, cover the nakedness of civilian gore and resistence.

The power of Finnegan's analysis of the recent history, this cultural shift in media and news reporting, could perhaps be written off by some as a rant from the left. However, the author has carefully let the newspeople on all sides speak for themselves. The book is packed with quotations and reflections on the part of people who are household names in the USA: Rather, Chung, Maher. Blitzer, Amanpour, and numerous others. Despite the clear evidence of dereliction of the duty to ask questions, many are still likely to excuse themselves or blame other forces for their temerity and seduction than to apologize and address the issues. The core US value of "speaking up" here as elsewhere seems to be replaced by CYA.

In time, reality began to seep through the cracks. No WMDs, lots of real torture, flouting of the Geneva Convention, gutted constitutional rights, and above all the callous response to Katrina's victims are starting to bring home the terrible lack of investigative mettle and the ability of the both the USA as a nation and its media to see and criticize themselves.Will this lesson be taught and learned and make a difference? Finnegan offers steps back to honesty, responsibility and sanity, but how do you fix a broken mirror...?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Journalism Review: Bungling the WMD Story, April 11, 2007

By 

Farhad Abdolian "Book Reader" (Hawthorne, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11 (Democracy and the News) (Hardcover)

[...]Bungling the WMD Story

No Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11
By Lisa Finnegan
[...]

By Carl Sessions Stepp

Carl Sessions Stepp ([e-mail]), AJR's senior editor, teaches at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Here's an idea: Turn a psychologist loose on journalists.

Lisa Finnegan is a former newspaper and magazine writer who earned a psychology degree and now studies "the psychology of terrorism and its impact on the media." Here, she analyzes why the U.S. press became so meek after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Many others have documented the press' letdown in fulfilling its adversarial role after 9/11. Seeing the problem is easy. Explaining it is harder (see Books, August/September). So Finnegan's rather studious approach, drawing on individual and group psychology, holds promise for not only understanding the failures but pointing toward reforms.

Obviously, whatever went wrong has potentially staggering costs: the top terrorist still on the loose, a war spun out of control and a civil liberties crisis at home. Finnegan criticizes Congress and the public itself, among others, but she firmly casts central blame onto the media.

Why did journalists, who at least in their own imaginations form a fearless and independent Fourth Estate of relentless truth seekers, buckle so easily? How did an administration that couldn't seem to accomplish much else tame these watchdogs into marginalized yappers?

Finnegan's most provocative proposition is that press docility stemmed from a calculation of self-interest. "American journalists determined that in the highly charged environment that followed the 9/11 attacks, believing the administration's claims and keeping their questions in check best served their interests," she says. "To do otherwise could have led to ostracism by the administration and the general public, and possible harm to their careers."

Their motives? Profit and prizes, Finnegan says. In the run-up to the war, for instance, she charges that the media "highlighted alarmist viewpoints, minimized alternative perspectives, convinced the American public that the need to go to war in Iraq was urgent, and then gathered their Pulitzers and justified their work."

Unfortunately, Finnegan doesn't back this with evidence. She does show examples of media failure, and quotes journalists who felt intimidated. But she makes no substantial case that their submissiveness was intentional, and none that it was driven by a Pulitzer quest.

If her look at material motives rings false, however, her psychological analysis seems more convincing. It starts with the simple power of patriotism. After 9/11, she writes, "journalists were shaken..they were focused on the fact that the United States was vulnerable, and deemed everything else unimportant." So they didn't probe the breakdowns that let the attacks take place, scrutinize the administration's response or effectively resist its moves to control information and divert attention. Some even wore lapel flag pins.

The press hardly squeaked when the government tried to turn the debate into what President Bush called "a black-and-white choice with no grays." Or when his spokesman Ari Fleischer warned, "All Americans..need to watch what they say." Or when Attorney General John Ashcroft complained, about those who questioned the Patriot Act, "Your tactics only aid terrorists."

Finnegan also believes many reporters were personally "traumatized." She quotes a New York photographer as saying that "the most jarring thing was seeing myself and my colleagues just fall apart on the job."

Intimidated and fearful, some journalists turned to government for safety and reassurance. Finnegan says this may have been especially true among the more than 600 journalists embedded with troops. That led, she says, to becoming overprotective of authorities and slow to chase bombing errors, torture and policy failures.

More darkly, she suggests a U.S. policy of "targeting journalists," especially those who tried to operate outside the official embedding system. After several international journalists were killed by U.S. forces, a Pentagon spokesperson warned against independent reporting. "We are saying it is not a safe place; you should not be there." (See "Close to the Action," May 2003.)

Overall, Finnegan believes, the press lapsed obediently into innocuous "groupthink." "During times of uncertainty," she contends, "reporters tend to be more subservient than objective."

This part of Finnegan's analysis rings truer: a press at first respectful in the face of tragedy, then unduly passive under the pounding of hardball politics and propaganda.

If this is human nature, as Finnegan suggests, then is there a cure? At least, she says, you can "minimize your vulnerability to such manipulation." Her suggestions boil down to detachment and determination: Ask hard questions, pursue documentation, seek comments outside the party line and follow up on loose ends and claims. It seems like pretty good psychology: Just use your head.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An eye-opening survey of democratic process and news reporting emerges, March 11, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11 (Democracy and the News) (Hardcover)

NO QUESTIONS ASKED: NEWS COVERAGE SINCE 9/11 surveys the American media and its manipulation post-9/11, considering how the facts were misunderstood by the American public due to the lack of the right questions from reporters, and pinpointing mistruths about the war in Iraq and the nature of the threat of world terrorism. An eye-opening survey of democratic process and news reporting emerges which holds particular impact and importance for any college-level library strong in media studies.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch