Last Friday marked what could have been an extremely important day in the 2004 presidential race. Just four days before the election, Al-Jazeera aired footage of Osama bin Laden alive, healthy and boldly denouncing the United States and its policies. Revealed just days before months of campaigning were finally set to conclude at the polls, the tape seemed to have the potential to turn a deadlocked race into one favoring the candidate most likely to change current American foreign policy: John Kerry. It was a final reminder that al Qaeda has yet to be dismantled and despite all the financial and military resources the United States and the rest of the world has spent trying to eradicate the organization, the network and its top leader are still intact. Such a message certainly had some effect on the American voting constituency, right?
Actually, no. A CBS poll taken between Thursday and Sunday showed that Bush had a 1-percentage-point lead over Kerry and that the tape had no effect on the polls. Furthermore, the incident received little coverage on news networks and was instead overshadowed by other election headlines. On the day of the election, the story failed to make the headlines on CNN’s website, and even after clicking on the “World” news link, one had to scroll to the bottom of the screen, find the section on Middle East world politics and click on the third article listed. The story received no sensationalized coverage, no reactionary red banners running across news networks’ screens and no over-hyped responses from political analysts predicting a pending terrorist attack.
Instead, a threat to “bleed America to the point of bankruptcy” passed under the spotlight of the media with little more than a bat of the eye from its readers and viewers. Consequently, the tape didn’t achieve its apparently intended purpose: it didn’t intimidate, it didn’t spread fear and, in general, it didn’t make Americans feel less secure than before its release. In fact, from an atmosphere in which many federal authorities believed al Qaeda could be planning a major pre-election terrorist attack, the tape seemed like somewhat of a relief.
Certainly the media didn’t make a conscious effort to downplay the tapes. The lack of attention was due primarily to the salience of news surrounding the election and a consequent lack of time to focus on something not directly related to its outcome. Yet, perhaps a lesson can be learned. The events surrounding Spain’s election this last March are still fresh in everyone’s mind: the governing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar led in the polls until just days before the election, when terrorists claimed responsibility for a horrifying train bombing in Madrid. His Socialist opposition, promising to withdraw troops from Iraq by June 30, 2004, defeated Aznar, a supporter of Bush’s policy in Iraq. The correlation may not have been true for every Spanish voter, but the fact remains that the election appeared to favor the Spanish Conservative Party, a highly publicized bombing occurred and voting consequently took an unexpected turn.
To many analysts, the Spanish elections sent a message that terrorists are capable of manipulating an election and controlling the behavior of people distanced from their actual attacks. While Osama bin Laden’s tape was not nearly as devastating as a bombing and therefore less likely to draw media coverage by its very nature, it still intended to create a sense of apprehension in its recipients, the people of the United States. Just as the bombing preceded a swinging of the Spanish election in favor of the candidate likely to reduce Western influence in the Arab world, a tape threatening the United States to leave the Muslim world or suffer bankruptcy was also intended to intimidate voters.
While Osama Bin Laden released his first tape in nearly three years, it received minimal media coverage, and most Americans knew little of its content or even existence leading into the election. With little exposure and a simple lack of interest from news anchors and consequently individual citizens, the words of the al Qaeda leader failed to resonate. The threat the tape articulated could have received more media attention and therefore played a larger factor in the 2004 election, yet unlike the Spanish elections, the presidential race continued on the same projected path it had been following for months. Terrorism cannot exist without the media, and the inability of bin Laden’s tapes to affect the presidential race allowed the American people to unknowingly send a message back to the terrorists: The spread and effectiveness of terrorism in the United States today depends in large part on the attention of the American media, but unlike Spain, we won’t let the threats of a extreme terrorist bully us into a change in our vote on Election Day.
Jamie Shookman ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in English and political science.
