U.S. overreacted to 9-11: journalist; ‘Security is exaggerated when it infringes on our rights and our customs’
SUDBURY, ONTARIO, CANADA – Terrorism has been a focus of the media since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but the coverage may have done more harm than good, a senior journalist with CBC Radio-Canada told a Sudbury audience Thursday.
Francois Brousseau was part of a roundtable discussion at the University of Sudbury. The topic was media, security and liberty: the stakes and challenges since Sept. 11, 2001. He said media coverage of the attacks and the ensuing war on terror played into the paranoia that has gripped the United States.
“If we simply repeat what’s being said by the president and don’t check it against facts, we don’t do our job,” Brousseau said. “Our job is to put it into context. In some cases, we didn’t do that, we didn’t do the job of challenging the assertions that came from above.
“It was terrible. You read the papers and it was just the official line and nothing else.”
After the initial shock of the attack, it was understandable that there was solidarity among Americans, he said.
American citizens were prepared to allow their government to do whatever it had to do, and their media didn’t question that, he said.
“I think the U.S. press in early 2003 to mid-2004 simply repeated the propaganda,” Brousseau said. “Newsrooms in most media – of course Fox News and CNN, and even the liberal papers – they went along completely.”
There was a lot of sympathy for the U.S. after the attacks, he said, but the nation’s actions and messages squandered that.
“They squandered that sympathy in the two or three years after, it is well known, because of Iraq and even because of some of the statements before the invasion,” he said. “Being the U.S., they tend to think they’re the ones who suffered the most. They tend to think that (terrorism) didn’t exist before them.”
“Sept. 11 is not the alpha and omega of terrorism.”
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