UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
programs in the tone in which the President was
covered. ABC World News Tonight was very
polarized in its portrayal of Mr Bush as the Commander-in-Chief,
with an equal 19.4% positive and
negative average implicit and explicit statements
with the President as the subject – a number of
negative statements on par with those of most
European news programs.
On NBC, the tone of the coverage was clearly
more positive, while the difference between positive
and negative statements was most glaring
on NBC, where it was explicitly or implicitly positive
41.9% of the time the President was its subject,
compared to 7% negative statements.
While U.S. news programs portrayed the President
and the war in a more positive light overall,
they nevertheless did so from different angles
and at different degrees of enthusiasm, leaving
us to wonder to which extent ideological differences
may account for variations in the news
coverage. These differences become more
apparent when we look at the frequency with
which voices of dissent were featured on the
news.
German TV presented a different reality: its
bias become obvious in the newscasters’ evaluation
of U.S. military actions. In the beginning of
the war one out of five verbal or visual portrayals
by RTL journalists was negative, only six percent
of all statements on the Americans were
positive. The coverage was particularly critical
by the end of March, as U.S. advances, according
to the journalists, were beginning to slow down
and the end of the war was not yet in sight,.
Instead, there was talk of the threats of house-tohouse
fighting or the deployment of biological
and chemical weapons. The BBC, on the other
hand, assessed the American war effort in an
270
overall balanced manner, despite American
‘friendly fire’ incidents leading to the deaths of
British troops.
In the Czech Republic, a member of the war
alliance, the assessment of U.S. military actions
was slightly negative, while in South Africa a
more differentiated picture emerges: Whereas
the public broadcaster, English-language SABC
NEWS portrayed the American military more
positively than negatively, the private television
station E-TV criticized them harshly. This program,
which targets South Africans of Indian origin
ended their newscasts day after day with the
same remark. So far, E-TV would say, the Americans
have not found any weapons of mass
destruction. Of all analyzed media, only the BBC
maintained an equilibrium of sorts of positive
and negative coverage, mostly remaining
ambivalent in tone, with far fewer explicitly positive
or negative statements than its German or
U.S. counterparts.
International differences became even clearer
when it came to the choice of protagonists of the
news coverage. In the U.S., more than half of the
protagonists of news stories on the war were
either U.S. politicians or military personnel
(ABC: 53%; NBC: 54%; NBC: 58.1%), more than
twice as many as on the average foreign news
program.
More tellingly, while TV news outside of the
U.S. made frequent reference to British and
other coalition troops, British troops figured little
in U.S. coverage of the war and coalition
troops from other countries played almost no
role at all. U.S. TV news coverage was thus
arguably as unilateral as the actions of the Bush
administration, a point further illustrated by
comparing the amount of coverage on military