Terror tapes: smoking gun or smoke screeen?

The tape was on every single American TV network played non-stop during prime time television. 

The Bush administration called it "the smoking gun" which would help nail bin Laden as the mastermind behind the horrendous attacks on the US which accounted for over 3,000 lives.

But more than one Arab journalist went on network television to dismiss the grainy tape as a "fake" even as the New York Times quoted US officials as saying it was of "poor quality". 

Jay Leno, the stand-up comedian, added some levity to the controversy when he said the tape was a three-day rental which had to be returned to the Blockbuster video store in Kabul by next week.

If the tape is proved to be authentic, it will justify the US war against the already-crumbled Taliban regime in Afghanistan which provided safe haven to bin Laden — but certainly not the killings of hundreds of civilian and the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e- Sharif.

The irony of the broadcast was not lost on the TV networks who said that only last month the Bush administration had urged them not to air any video tapes of bin Laden because he could be signalling hidden messages to his followers worldwide.

Peter Jennings of the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was quoted as saying that the administration had "leaned heavily" on the networks asking them not to broadcast previous bin Laden tapes. The Arab media, on the other hand, remained sceptical about the authenticity of the tapes describing it as "fabricated."

The most vocal has been the 24-hour Qatar-based Arabic language TV satellite Al-Jazeera which is broadcast into almost every home in the Arab world and is perhaps the most influential media outlet in the Middle East.

At a meeting with Jewish leaders last week, President George Bush agreed with the complaint that there was a need "to control the anti-American, anti-Israel media" in the Middle East.

According to the New York Times version of the meeting, Bush gave assurances that the US is sending messages to Arab leaders asking them to control their media — and particularly Al-Jazeera which he described as "the big one". Conversely, the Arabs have continued to complain that the American news media are not only biased but also strongly pro-Israel and anti-Islam in their sentiments. At a UN seminar early this month, Steve Williams, a senior editor of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World News, was asked why the BBC has relatively more credibility than any of the American networks. Williams admitted that even though there were "very good American media outlets", about 90 percent of them appeared to be pro-Israeli in their stories relating to the Middle East.

The BBC offered a different perspective and therefore had a good response in the United States, he said, perhaps because people were seeing the story in a different way for the first time.

At BBC World News, only 20 percent of the staff were white/Caucasian/British. The rest were of different nationalities, accounting for an ethnically diverse work force.

On September 12, the day after the attacks on the US, Williams summoned his planning team to discuss coverage.

The team, he said, included a Moroccan, a Lebanese, a German and an Australian. As head of the team, he was the only Britisher and white.

At the meeting, the Moroccan said: "What on earth is the BBC using the word 'Islamic' as an adjective to describe Hizbollah and Hamas when, frankly, we don't use the word 'Christian' to describe the Irish Republican Army (IRA)".

The point was well taken. 

Williams said that if all news rooms have ethnically diverse staff, their news coverage will reflect different perspectives.