The military's media.

AuthorJensen, Robert
PositionCover Story - Cover Story

ONE OF THE FIRST REPORTS of the Iraq War from an embedded journalist has turned out to be remarkably prescient about the level of independence viewers could expect from U.S. television journalists. CBS News reporter Jim Axelrod, traveling with the Third Infantry, told viewers that he had just come from a military intelligence briefing, where "we've been given orders." Axelrod quickly corrected himself--"soldiers have been given orders"--but it was difficult not to notice his slip.

U.S. reporters weren't taking orders directly from the Pentagon, of course, but one could forgive television viewers for wondering, especially early on. U.S. commanders may have had a few problems on the battlefield, but they had little to worry about from the news media--especially on television.

If the first two weeks of coverage was any indication, this war will be a case study in the failure of success of U.S. journalism.

The success came in the technological sophistication and deployment of resources: the ability of journalists, demonstrating considerable skill and fortitude, to deliver words and pictures from halfway around the world with incredible speed under difficult conditions. The failure was in journalists' inability to offer an account of events that could help people come to the fullest possible understanding--not only of what was happening in the war, but why it was happening and what it meant.

First, dear criteria are needed to evaluate news media performance, based on what citizens in a democracy need from journalists: 1) an independent source of factual information; 2) the historical, political, and social context in which to make sense of those facts; and 3) exposure to the widest range of opinion available in the society.

News media failures on #2 and #3 are the most obvious. U.S. media provided woefully limited background and context, and the range of opinion tended to run, as the old joke goes, from A to B.

On television, current military officers were "balanced" with retired military officers. (A recent study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted that 76 percent of the guests on network talk shows in late January and early February were current or former officials, and that anti-war sources accounted for less than 1 percent.) So for the week before and after Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the United Nations--when a full and rich discussion about the war was crucial--there was no meaningful debate on the main news shows of CBS, ABC, NBC, or PBS. Studies of the op-ed pages of The Washington Post, often considered to be a liberal newspaper, showed that the pro-war opinions dominated--by a 3-to-1 ratio from December 1 through February 21, according to Todd Gitlin's analysis in The American Prospect.

The media didn't even provide the straight facts well. At the core of coverage of this war was the system of "embedding" reporters with troops, allowing reporters to travel with military units--so long as they followed the rules. Those rules said reporters could not travel independently (which meant they could not really report independently), interviews had to be on the record (which meant lower-level service members were less likely to say anything critical), and officers could censor copy and temporarily restrict electronic transmissions for "operational security" (which, in practice, could be defined as whatever field commanders want to censor). In the first two weeks...

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