UPDATED - ColdType

The data confirming that we were ill served by
the media is now in from Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting. It studied U.S. war coverage and
found “the guest lists of major nightly newscasts
were dominated by government and military
officials, disproportionately favored pro-war
voices, and marginalized dissenters.
Starting the day after the invasion of Iraq
began, the three-week study covered the most
intense weeks of the war (March 20 to April 9). It
examined 1,617 on-camera sources in stories
about Iraq on six major evening newscasts: ABC
World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC
Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox
News Channel’s Special Report with Brit Hume
and PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Among their findings: “Official voices dominate:
63 percent of all sources were current or
former government employees. U.S. officials
alone accounted for more than half, 52 percent,
of all sources.”
The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman
contrasted U.S. and British coverage, charging
that U.S. outlets “behaved like state-run media.”
Geneva Overholser, a former ombudsperson at
the Washington Post, now with the Poynter Institute,
agrees. “The comments I’ve been hearing
about U.S. media becoming ever more like staterun
media seem to me to evoke something
deeper than partisanship or ideology.
“What I sense is a narrowing of the discussion,
a ruttedness – call it an echo chamber of conventionalism.
Sure, we have the appearance of controversy,
what with our shouting heads and
sneering pundits. But real debate – substantive
representation of viewpoints not currently in
vogue, of people not currently in power, of issues
not currently appearing in our narrowly focused
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eye – is almost absent.”
It seems clear that this pattern of coverage is
unlikely to improve unless and until the media
system itself is reformed. For that to happen,
more Americans need to see media as an issue,
not a complaint. ●
NOW THAT THE WAR IS OVER,
MEDIA SHAME SURFACES
NEW YORK, MAY 08, 2003 – “Disgusting” is a
strong word to apply to the Iraq war coverage,
but that’s the epithet author Russell Smith
invokes in the new issue of The New York
Review of Books in a column about “new
newspeak” that indicts “patriotic lapses in objectivity.”
Even as NBC rushes out a new book lionizing
its war coverage, a small undercurrent of criticism
from within the news industry threatens to
turn into a flood of denunciation as the shock
and awe wears off, and journalists realize how
badly they have been had.
This tends to follow a rule first enunciated by
the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
who wrote: “All truth passes through three
stages. First it is ridiculed. Second it is violently
opposed. Third it is accepted as self-evident.”
Stage One: Ridicule. In the aftermath of President
Bush’s flight to an aircraft carrier for a
heavily-staged photo-op, questions, comments,
sneers and jeers are slowly rising up from a
press corps that heretofore has been compliant,
complicit and in the words of James Wolcott in
Vanity Fair, easily bullied.
Stage Two: Violent Opposition. We have wit-