Media: The Battle For Hearts And Minds

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We were told that a counterstrike might follow last week's air attacks on Afghanistan. But we did not expect that it would come so soon or that the weapon of choice would be videotape. About an hour after the bombing campaign began, Americans were dumbstruck to see the placid face of the enemy, Osama bin Laden, in their living rooms. Outside a secret cave hideout, a Kalashnikov rifle beside him, he directly challenged the official U.S. line by casting the fight, in flowery classical Arabic, as one between Islam and the West. "America," he said, "will never taste security and safety unless we feel security and safety in our land."

More than most wars, this is a media war. The second strike at the World Trade Center, on live TV, could not have been better timed to detonate like a fireball in the hearts of millions. Now bin Laden was cannily, politically using the mass media for a spin strike aimed at the world's billion Muslims. On Tuesday, his lieutenant Sleiman Abou-Gheith followed with an appeal to Arab unity and the promise of a further "storm of airplanes" against America.

"Prior to Sept. 11, we did not realize that we were in a propaganda war, but we were," says Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University and a former director of the university's Middle East Institute. It is a war fought in news studios in Qatar and with editorials, sermons and press conferences. It is a war that the U.S. needs to fight not only to stanch the supply of extremists willing to die to murder Americans but also to shore up nervous moderate Arab allies, who fear their people may turn on them for supporting the bombing of Muslims.

And it is a war, say many observers in the U.S. and the Middle East, in which America is at best playing catch-up, at worst losing. President Bush, at a prime-time press conference Thursday, seemed flummoxed at lingering anti-U.S. sentiment after the bombings: "I am amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about... We've got to do a better job of making our case."

The problem is not so much the U.S. message--that our war is not with Islam, that many countries lost citizens in the attacks, and so on--as the fact that it is not reaching Arabs. Too few U.S. representatives in the Middle East speak Arabic. Too few U.S. officials show up on the dominant Arab TV-news network. The U.S. has invested too little in cultural exchange. The overall failing is perhaps simply that the government has no coordinated communications--oh, let's say it, propaganda--strategy. Asks Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee: "How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas?"