On September 19th the Washington Times reported that a army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, James Yee, had been charged with espionage, aiding the enemy and spying. The media representation of the event was pure and simple discrimination. In the post 9/11 America the media have become lapdogs, not watchdogs, of American power.

On September 19th the Washington Times reported that a army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, James Yee, had been charged with espionage, aiding the enemy and spying. The media representation of the event was pure and simple discrimination.

This discrimination was not explicit but implicit. The coverage discriminated against Yee in several ways. First there were omissions in the coverage, blind spots that the media neglected. Second there were references to other larger stories which invoked guilt by association. Third, the stories were constructed to create an impression that was unfair and untrue.

The biggest omission in the coverage is Yee himself. He had no opportunity to respond to the accusations against him. Yee's absence from the coverage served to magnify the power of his accusers, military officials who were given ample space to anonymously voice their opinions. Here is one:

Yee is "believed to have ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.] that are now under investigation," the source said. He said he could not elaborate on the basis for that belief.

This quote is troubling. The accuser is not named, and is therefor protected; second it is without substance, there is no elaboration given to explain its truth. It's a deeply damaging accusation coming out of nowhere based on nothing.

This baseless accusations wouldn't have been so bad if the stories had some balance, but they didn't. No other source refuted the allegations. Yee's lawyer wasn't in the CNN story. His wife was not interviewed until five days after the story broke, 15 days after his arrest. When she got some print space she took the opportunity to set the record straight on several issues including the use of his name. The media frequently reported named Yee as "Youseff Yee." Youseff is a transliteration of Joseph, not James. Yee was variously know as James, Jimmy, and sometimes Youseff. The last, Youseff, was a term that only his wife, a Syrian, used because she said it was easier for her to pronounce than James.

Few media outlets referred to James Yee as Jimmy, which would have had a familiar ring to many Americans and was how his hometown friends knew him. Instead most media used the Muslim-nuanced Youseff, some even going so far as to suggest that Jimmy Yee had changed his name to Youseff after having converted to Islam.

All the newspapers say that he changed his name," she said. "It's not true — he never changed his name. He likes his name."

The process by which Yee was being distanced from the military and the American people had begun. Youseff Yee was being painted as an outsider, an enemy, a "radical Muslim."
This image came from the highest sources. After the story broke, Charles Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York called Yee and another suspect terrorists. Terrorism is "the use of violence or intimidation, especially for political purposes." To call Yee a terrorist is flatly wrong. Yee isn't accused of using violence or intimidation and there is no evidence that beyond his high school wrestling team he ever engaged in either.

Schumer's logic seems to be that since Yee is a Muslim he must also be a terrorist. It's a ridiculous accusation, yet most stories let it stand without qualification.
Yee has still not been charged with a crime. The public evidence is not exactly overwhelming. According to media reports he was carrying diagrams of the cellblocks and a list of the prisoner's names when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida. Considering that the Guantanamo camp is a huge detention center housing 660 detainees over a wide area, the idea of a carrying a map to locate individuals within the camp is not unimaginable. NPR, in an interview with Eric Lichtblau, the New York Times reporter on the story, brought this up. Lichtblau said, "there may be an explanation for this." He goes on to say the facts are generally unclear and Yee may not be guilty. However the article with Litchblau's name on it that hits the paper the next day paints a different picture. First the New York Times article opens with the headline: "Army Cleric Who Ministered to Detainees Is Arrested"

Cleric is an odd word to use. Litchblau himselft calls him a chaplain. By definition a cleric is "a member of the clergy," which according to the Oxford paperback dictionary is the group of "people who have been ordained as priests of ministers of the Christian Church." According to this definition it would be impossible for a Muslim to be a cleric.

The term Litchblau used "chaplain" is obviously more accurate. It describes "an ecclesiastic attached to the chapel of a royal court, college etc. or to a military unit," which fits perfectly.

Why did the headline use cleric? The word cleric has been frequently used in the construction "Muslim cleric." Including the word cleric in the headline may have been a way to insinuate that Yee was a Muslim.
Jaap Van Kinnekin, a media critic, said that stories seem to derive almost from a larger framework of cultural presuppositions. "Stories... do not usually stand on their own, but form part of an ongoing story." Individual stories fit into larger mega-stories.

Is there a cultural presupposition at work here? The story of a Muslim chaplain being arrested for espionage fits into the emerging mega-story of the twenty-first century. What Samuel Huntington has called the clash of civilizations, intermittent conflicts between the West and Islam. A story from the Washington Times explicitly invokes Huntington's ideology. Written by Wesley Pruden after it was reported that a second soldier had been arrested at Guantanamo, he said officials looking into the arrests should be wary "turning a blind eye to bad guys professing to be saints doing the work of Allah. We saw some of this handiwork on September 11."
Pruden continues:

the issue of Muslims in the American military, when millions of Muslims want to make the war on terrorism a clash of civilizations, is an issue that those at the highest level of the government cannot ignore, even in the name of tolerance.

This is classic guilt by association. Here James Yee a Muslim chaplain who was arrested by customs officials in Florida because he was carrying a list of prisoner's names and a diagram of Guantanamo is lumped in with a group of terrorists that killed 3,000 people. What do they have in common, they're all Muslim. This fact was obviously important in the coverage.

Media critics such as Stuart Hall have said that the placement of information in a story crafts the meaning of the story. In Yee's case the true meaning came out fast, furiously and almost always in the lead. Yee is a Muslim. This was mentioned in the leads for the nine out of 10 stories surveyed.

Why is this so relevant? The word Muslim is now so tightly wound with the words extremist, terrorist, radical and fundamentalist that it seems almost impossible to use it without some assumption of guilt.
Was there an assumption of guilt? Let's make a comparison.

Suppose there were two similar incidents of negligence in discharging military duties around the same time. Two cases of negligence with only one difference, one is committed by a Muslim, the other isn't. That would provide a relatively controlled way to gauge any discrimination in coverage.
Coincidentally there was. On the same day that the Yee arrest was reported another case of obvious military transgression was reported in Iraq. A soldier at the Baghdad Zoo shot a Bengal tiger. Witnesses said the soldier was drunk. Now this seems an obvious breach of military duties. You would think that both Yee and the soldier might be subjected to charges of violating military law, if the investigation finds grounds for any such charges.

But the two stories are very different. Both CNN and AP's stories on the incident do not name the soldier involved nor do they, unlike the Yee story, guess at what the charges would be. They do not separate this soldier from the pack. The coverage is dramatically different in the Yee case. The Washington Times which broke the story used this headline: "Islamic chaplain is charged as spy." The lead then follows with this:

An Army Islamic chaplain, who counseled al Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, has been charged with espionage, aiding the enemy and spying, The Washington Times has learned.

In actual fact it Yee hadn't been charged at all. No espionage, no aiding the enemy, and no spying. No nothing, he is being held without charges of any kind. The New York Times article which ran in the late edition the same day was more circumspect. It reads: "the investigation was aimed at suspicions of espionage, improperly assisting the prisoners or some other breach of military duties." Or some other breach of military duty, like maybe getting wasted and shooting a tiger three times in the head? I imagine both would qualify as a breach of military duty. But only one of the accused is reported as a spy who is "aiding the enemy."

There's more. In the tiger shooting CNN, Reuters and AP call the transgressor a "U.S. soldier" in the headline. The CNN headline reads: "U.S. soldier kills Baghdad tiger." In the Yee case by comparison, the headline doesn't call Yee a U.S. soldier, which he obviously is, instead it says "Islamic chaplain is charged as spy." By calling Yee Islamic and a spy the headline separates Yee from the majority of the U.S. soldiers. It paints him as the enemy.

What are the differences between these two stories, both of which deal with breaches of military duty? Here are the differences: Yee is being held without charge in South Carolina. The tiger-shooter isn't even named, much less charged. Yee has been called a spy, a traitor and terrorist, the tiger-shooter is called a soldier.
The meaning is clear: Yee's a Muslim, Muslims are terrorists. Yee is guilty without charge.

The consequence of this kind of discrimination goes beyond one man sitting in prison without charge, it creates an image of suspicision and culpability directed at all Muslims. This is exactly the kind of abuse of power that the media is suppossed to watch against, but instead they contribute to it. In the post 9/11 America the media have become lapdogs, not watchdogs, of American power.