UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
tured on all three programs were Iraqi civilians,
on BBC they comprised 17.1%. NBC Nightly News
was the only news program in our analysis on
which Iraqi civilians made up less than 10% of the
featured protagonists, while the numbers were
slightly higher on the other networks (ABC:
13.7%, NBC: 9.6%, NBC: 12.1%).
The American way of reporting I:
unseen U.S. casualties
ANOTHER category in which American news
programs fell markedly behind in their coverage
was the depiction of American casualties. After
Al-Jazeera was sharply rebuked by U.S. officials
for broadcasting images of dead and captured
POWs, the depiction of U.S. casualties in particular
seemed to become taboo on U.S. news programs.
Short of saying that news producers and journalists
were cowed into withholding information,
Media Tenor’s data clearly shows a much greater
reluctance on the part of U.S. news programs to
show images of American dead and wounded
than on foreign news programs, even though
they had no problems depicting dead or
wounded Iraqis – on NBC, the share of visual
depictions on dead or wounded Iraqis even
exceeded the share of verbal statements.
Of all statements on dead, wounded or missing
American soldiers on both ABC and NBC, 80.6%
were delivered verbally, while only 19.4% were
delivered in the form of visual depictions. On
NBC, the share of visually depicted dead, missing
or wounded was significantly higher, with
42.4% of all statements on the subject.
The coverage of Iraqi casualties offers one of
the most obvious differences between coverage
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in the U.S. and abroad, particularly if one considers
that the number of American casualties was
lower than in the Persian Gulf war, while the
number of Iraqi casualties, both military and
civilian, numbers in the thousands. In the U.S.,
allied casualties comprised up to two thirds of all
casualties reported on in evening news (ABC:
58.9%, NBC: 60.5%, NBC: 67%). On BBC news programs,
allied casualties made up 44.2% of casualties
reported on; 50.6% were Iraqis. In Germany,
the picture was almost the exact opposite from
the U.S. On the low extreme, only 26.5% of casualties
on ARD were allies, while 69.9% were
Iraqis (ZDF: 35.9%/ 58.8%, RTL: 42.3%/ 55.1%).
The American way of reporting II:
CBS silences dissent
IN their reports on U.S. society during the war,
we found significant differences among U.S.
news programs in the amount of coverage given
to protests against the war. ABC World News
Tonight reported most frequently on protests
(101 statements), followed by NBC Nightly News
(68 statements). With only 6 statements on
protests in the U.S. in the time frame of our
analysis, CBS Evening News hardly ever exposed
its viewers to news of dissent among Americans.
Only NBC featured a notable amount of coverage
on both protests and political affairs in reference
to societal protagonists in the U.S.
With a geographical focus on non-allied countries,
all three networks featured a comparable
amount of coverage on these political aspects,
but, once again, the disparity between the networks
in their coverage of protests was glaring,
with ABC taking the lead and NBC barely
acknowledging protests abroad.