The"Liberal Media" and Iraq coverage...
some more for you to ponder
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The United States unilateral preemptive strike against Iraq is one of this budding decade’s biggest stories. Surely a liberal media would pounce on this opportunity to question and challenge a conservative administrations tactics. To the contrary, the media was not only lacking a liberal slant, but it failed in its duty to serve as a balance and fact checker to the Executive branch’s hawkish march to war. Once the actual invasion began the media still was limited in its objective coverage, instead serving as sounding board, repeating the Administrations message.

A study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that television newscasts largely excluded skeptics of the invasion of Iraq in the two weeks of coverage leading up to the event. In its study FAIR examined 393 on-camera sources in nightly news stories about Iraq. More than two-thirds of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, 75% were either current or former government or military officials. Similarly, when both U.S. and non-U.S. guests were included, 76% were either current or retired officials. FAIR asserts that such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and dissenting perspectives will be underrepresented.

Of all official sources, 75% were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that supported the Bush administration's position on Iraq. Only 2% of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war. Of the total on-camera sources only 68, or 17%, represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy.[i]

Part of this lack of perspective could be due to the relativity little accountability demanded by America’s prominent newspapers.

Washington Post editors acknowledge that the President and other administration officials had no problem receiving prominent coverage in the paper, even when their warnings were repetitive. "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power," said Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor for the Post. "If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said." And if contrary arguments are put "in the eighth paragraph, where they're not on the front page, a lot of people don't read that far."[ii]

In an October 2004 Post article, reporter Howard Kurtz states that “the front page is a newspaper's billboard, its way of making a statement about what is important, and stories trumpeted there are often picked up by other news outlets”. The troubling part of this is that the Post acknowledges that its coverage was self censored, moving questioning articles to the middle of the paper, away from front page prominence. “We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," said Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward. “We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier [than widely believed]...Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."[iii]

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," said Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority." The Post article also points to how some other news organizations have “cast a withering eye on their earlier work”. Specifically cited were The New York Times and The New Republic magazine[1] expressing regret for their prewar editorial arguments about the Iraq invasion.[iv]

Other forms of media also unduly practiced self-regulation. In a 2005 study reported by Editor& Publisher, it was found the many media outlets “self-censored their reporting on the Iraq invasion because of concerns about public reaction to graphic images and content”.[v]

This is a disturbing but not easily understood issue. “There is no single explanation for these holes in the coverage, but I would argue that our devotion to what we call "objectivity" played a role.” Writes Brent Cunningham, of the Columbia Journalism Review “It's true that the Bush administration is like a clenched fist with information, one that won't hesitate to hit back when pressed. And that reporting on the possible aftermath of a war before the war occurs, in particular, was a difficult and speculative story.”[vi]

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[1] These two news sources are often lambasted by the Right as being the bastions of the liberal media. If these strong hold of the press’s liberal slant were deferring to the right, how much more were “objective news sources" doing?

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[i] Rendall, S. & Broughel, T. (2003 May). Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent. Fair & Accuracy In Reporting. Retrieved April 25, 2005 from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1145

[ii] Kurtz, H. (2004, August 12). The Post on WMDs: An inside story. The Washington Post. p. A01 Retrieved April 22, 2005 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug11.html

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Ibid

[v] Strupp, J. (2005, March 19). Study: Media self-censored some Iraq coverage. Editor & Publisher. Retrieved April 22, 2005 from http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000846234

[vi] Cunningham, B. (2003 April). Re-thinking Objectivity. Columbia Journalism Review. 456, 33-41.