“In what Defense Department statistics show to be the deadliest year so far for U.S. forces in Iraq, journalists have responded to the challenge of covering the continuing violence by keeping many of the accounts of these attacks brief and limiting the interpretation they contain,” begins a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
According to the study, mainstream media began to report less on daily attacks in Iraq in June 2007 which “coincided with a rising sense among the American public that military efforts in Iraq were going very or fairly well.”
The study found that within the over 1,000 stories surveyed from a variety of mainstream media sources, daily accounts of violence in Iraq only made up 47 percent of all stories within the first 10 months of 2007. Many of those stories were short and represented a mere 27 percent of the newshole. During June 2007, over half of the stories were about violent incidents, but in September and October that dropped to about one-third.
Although 56 percent of the stories studied gave an assessment of the occupation of Iraq, the coverage was “more skeptical of the Iraqi government and the stability of the country than it was of U.S. policy.” Further, stories “assessing the effectiveness of U.S. policy” were usually “neither distinctly positive nor negative in the message they conveyed.” Four in ten stories “offered a mixed assessment, a third were pessimistic, and a quarter “saw things as improving.”
<!--[endif]-->There are more private contractors in Iraq, including the mercenary company named Blackwater, but coverage of private contractors was only about 10 percent. Coverage of Iraqi civilians was only three percent of all stories surveyed, and five percent of the “overall newshole.”
The New York Times study of military analysts
The New York Times conducted a study of military analysts who appear on mainstream media news shows. “Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air,” according to the NY Times. Viewers are rarely told about those ties.
“Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse—an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks,” the NY Times discovered.
Some of the former analysts regretted their appearances on news shows.
Robert S. Bevelacqua, retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said, ““It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.”
“Night and day…I felt we’d been hosed,” said Kenneth Allard, former NBC military analyst.
Independent journalists & media critic weigh in
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who has reported from Iraq, spoke at Cornell University in March. Criticizing MSM’s coverage of Iraq, he said, “There has been a mild shift towards a bit more critical coverage, due largely to the dramatic shift in U.S. public opinion over the last few years. However, I still think most media is very pro-state in that it doesn't come close to reflecting the catastrophic nature of the situation on the ground.”
“I think that we now, largely, live in a media culture where if you can't explain something in a sound bite, then that is too much time,” he said. “And the situation in Iraq is incredibly complex and takes time to explain.”
Eric Alterman, professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, noted that only two newspapers ran a story about the “4,000th combat death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq.”
Alterman cites the lack of “strong anti-war voices in the discussion” as a “more pervasive problem than even the amount of coverage.”
Another major problem with MSM’s coverage of Iraq, Alterman believes, is the fact that the “experts, pundits, and reporters who got the story wrong in 2003 by failing to question the Bush administration’s clearly unrealistic plans for Iraq are unfortunately still controlling the mainstream discussion on the war.”
Journalist and media critic, Norman Solomon said in his documentary film War Made Easy, “If you’re pro-war, you’re objective. But if you’re anti-war, you’re biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn’t dream of making a statement that’s against a war.”
