The media frenzy over Cordoba House and Terry Jones's proposed Koran-burning raises the question of the media's ability to influence events as they unfold, making journalists, editors and producers actors in domestic and international politics. A recent New York Times article pondered the media's responsibility in fanning the flames of controversy to feed the 24-hour news cycle, noting that when the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS burned a Koran in 2008, the news media studiously ignored it precisely to avoid giving the congregation the visibility that it was seeking. Two years later, the media appears to have taken the stance that its sole responsibility is to cover the news, not to consider the impact that the coverage will have on the ground, and that suggestions from government officials that editors should consider refraining from publishing certain information or covering certain stories amount to censorship.
There is often merit to this argument, even when censorship isn't the government's primary goal, but in most cases, there is a world of difference between censorship and exercising editorial discretion. The AU community engaged in this very debate last semester, when a student columnist for the Eagle wrote an inflammatory column that, among other things, accused feminists and gay rights activists of seeking to abolish sexual passion and called date rape an "incoherent concept." For several weeks, the student body was divided between those who believed that the Eagle's editors should have exercised its prerogative to edit the columns that it publishes, and those who believed that any editorial intervention beyond light copy-editing would have violated the author's freedom of speech (see letters to the editor here and here). The campus was in an uproar, and the provost and vice president campus life wrote to the Eagle to reaffirm both AU's zero-tolerance attitude to rape or sexual violence of any kind, as well as its commitment to free speech. Ultimately, the Eagle's editors and editor-in-chief issued apologies as well.
So what does this have to do with international communication? As the course readings and class discussions have highlighted, new communication technologies have consistently expanded the sphere of influence of each individual as messages travel ever more quickly through space. This also means that each individual is now contained in the sphere of influence of an ever-increasing number of people. Two hundred years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a book burning in Florida might lead to riots in Afghanistan, which in turn would shape policy in Washington - all within a few hours. While it is technology that allows messages to be transmitted so quickly, human beings are ultimately responsible for their own decisions to perform (or not) a certain act, to publish or not publish certain information, including images, and how to present the information. Every time a news outlet picks up a story, there is a human, journalistic and editorial decision how to handle to story. This decision is repeated countless times in newsrooms and bloggers' basements, and the sum of all these individual decisions has a huge impact on events on the ground. What share of the responsibility falls to individual journalists, editors and producers? Is "just following the market/news cycle" the equivalent of "just following orders"?
This point emphasizes how the media, while crossing over national boundaries, is still going to be received within each nation's context. The majority of people within the US were probably offended by the idea of the burning of the Koran, but that message probably did not get transmitted. The news that was reported would mostly just focus on the event itself and not the reaction of most Americans. This can add more misunderstanding between the US and other nations. In the US, the event debate became an issue of supporting the troops abroad and protecting our national security. It was thus turned into a Patriotic message, that the burning would be un-patriotic and against our principles of supporting religious freedom. The way the media portrayed the event was almost as a stand-off between the pastor and the President. In the end, the media reaffirmed our nationhoodness-ity.
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