COMMENT
Mr. Jennings’s Medal
A content analysis claims that ABC was “antiwar.” What does that mean?
A study of television news coverage of the war in Iraq says ABC’s World News Tonight was the most antiwar — far more than CBS, NBC or Fox.
— USA Today, September 9
Antiwar? What are we to make of that word, exactly? For starters, it brings to mind a twelve-year-old study on press coverage of the Catholic Church by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the same outfit that did the study mentioned above. The findings then: press coverage is anti-Catholic. The center, which works to maintain a neutral image, did not use exactly those words but did frame its findings with a discussion of anti-Catholicism in America. And the sponsors of the study, the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic League, had no trouble characterizing it as confirming “everything most people sense about media bias against the church,” as a league official put it.
But to dig beneath the scientific-sounding mumbo in that study was to discover an Alice-in-Wonderland logic that essentially weighted as anti-Catholic bias any coverage of dissent and debate within the church. In an opening explanation of its methods, the study reprinted a straight news story about an outspoken priest/intellectual who was being silenced by the Vatican. The piece quoted the priest and described some of his controversial opinion. The center then explained its analysis: “The data we collected on this story would show that it presents a debate over Church policies on internal dissent, that the Church’s policies are criticized, and that the Church is characterized as oppressive.” Really. We wonder what the center would have reporters do? Edit away the priest’s view that a church that silences him might be oppressive? Ignore the significant and interesting ferment inside the Catholic Church? Real journalists would advocate precisely the opposite.
Which brings us to the “antiwar” label the center now hangs on ABC. The center this time studied ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, from the missile strikes on Baghdad March 19 through the fall of Tikrit on April 14. It measured the “tone of coverage in terms of opinions expressed on the war, on the administration’s policies, and on the military’s performance.” Fox came out “arguably the most prowar network” overall, and ABC came out at the other end of the spectrum.
The center did not release the underlying data for these findings, just a summary with a few examples. But the examples shed light. Of the people ABC quoted about the administration’s policy on the war, “fewer than two out of every five,” had “evaluations” that “were positive.” What was deemed “negative?” The example given was a quote from an Iraqi plaintively asking ABC’s John Donvan why the U.S. forces weren’t more helpful to his wife and children, who were without food and medicine.
About the military effort, ABC’s quotes were 56 percent “positive,” according to the study, which put the network well behind Fox (78 percent), CBS (73 percent), and NBC (64 percent). But what the study deemed “negative” sounds suspiciously like a willingness to show the face of war. The example: the ABC reporter Martha Raddatz translating an Iraqi civilian’s anguished April 8 complaint: “My neighbor and my wife died here. Because of Americans, there are three families that are all under the rubble.” According to the study, ABC ran almost three times as many stories with images of civilian casualties and twice as many stories with images of military casualties as Fox. In addition, the center points out that ABC “gave voice to the complaint that the U.S. was handling civil unrest poorly on fourteen occasions” in the final days of the war, whereas “that viewpoint never appeared on Fox.” Never appeared.
The center carefully avoids spelling out conclusions, but an unspoken implication drifts off the report like vapor — that some kind of mathematical “balance” between “negative” and “positive” quotes constitutes a rough measure of truth.
We don’t think so. The job of the press in wartime is to show the real course and nature of the fighting as best it can, and that has much to do with dried blood. And when an administration — rightly or wrongly — embarks on a radical preemptive war policy that is opposed by most of the world, the journalist’s job is to make sure that dissent and debate about that policy and its implementation are fully aired. This war was sold on the idea that the U.S. should strike first before Iraq handed around weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda terrorists, that Saddam was a global terrorist, not just a regional thug. But it looks as if Iraq had no WMD to pass out even if it had been inclined to do so. It also becomes clearer every day how terribly botched was postwar planning. The debate now is about how to salvage this deadly mess and leave Iraq more stable and less dangerous than it was before.
ABC's viewers will likely be more prepared to take part in that debate and less likely than viewers of other networks to have been surprised by what has developed since the fall fo Tikrit because, despite the pressure to be a cheerleader, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings was more probing during the war than its rivals. The center's antiwar label is looking like ABC's red badge of courage.
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