How War Affects the Newsroom
By Andrew J. Manuse
How War Affects the Newsroom
By Andrew J. Manuse
Wartime
creates a bit of a predicament for journalists, who have to balance their duty
to report all sides of the news with the government’s interest in protecting the
safety and morale of its troops. From time to time, the press has gone too far
both ways.
"Certain news networks, like Fox News, were actively routing for what we were doing in Iraq," said Mark Jurkowitz, ombudsman for the Boston Globe.
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* Gallup Poll: How
the Public Perceives Media News Coverage of the War in Iraq |
But, the media “is not supposed to pick sides,” he said. “Journalists are supposed to tell the truth to the best of their ability.”
What makes this even harder now, he added, is that “the issues and rhetoric of the opposition were constrained after 9/11.”
David Brudnoy, Media Critic and host of a daily radio show in Boston, agreed: “A lot of pro-American sentiment developed after 9/11, even from sources that usually prefer not to be seen as such.”
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From a CNN Report: Bombing
in Iraq |
Still, Brudnoy noticed a few discrepancies involving the opposing bias during war with Iraq. He said parts of the media emphasized civilian casualties caused by allied bombing without a corresponding proportion of reporting about the oppressive regime that the bombing was eliminating.
“The media are biased kinetically; biased in favor of what moves,” he wrote in an e-mail. “So a demonstration by protesters is covered more intensely than a calm meeting of rational people sitting in a room discussing things coherently.”
Geneva
Overholser, who teaches public affairs reporting at the Missouri School
of Journalism in Washington D.C., said she was affected by this in particular.
“I was watching CNN or MSNBC or FOX and they gave a little bit of [Donald Rumsfeld’s] press conference about the war, then went back to some [embedded
reporter’s] amazing video. Meanwhile, reporters were asking [Rumsfeld] questions
about what’s really going on and what affects [the government’s] decisions are
having.”
“It’s astonishing what we can see,” said Overholser. “I’ve seen abdominal surgery by an American military doctor of an Iraqi POW. But what are we really learning? I think we need to consider the fact that what we are not seeing is harder for us to concentrate on.
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Listen to Geneva Overholser
comment on broadcast news and embedded journalists: |
Furthermore, the media “are only touching on one kind of foreign news while the rest of the world keeps going on. The problems of tomorrow are arising somewhere else, and [the media] are not telling anyone anything.”
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Listen to Geneva Overholser explain why small newspapers should report more
international news:
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On that note, Egyptian Diplomat Khalid Emara was concerned about how the media has been focusing on other things while largely ignoring the aftermath of war in Afghanistan.
“The media should be out there, seeing if the operations in Afghanistan were successful or not,” said Emara, who is also a fellow at Harvard University. “Is it true that the United States is controlling Afghanistan today? Is it true that there are no strongholds of terrorism in Afghanistan anymore? Or is it true that the United States is barely controlling Kabul and it is under attack constantly by terrorists that are flourishing out by the borders of Pakistan? This is the true story; people need to understand why this is happening and why terrorists have not been eradicated from their strongholds.”
To be fair, the Wall Street Journal had an article on this subject today (4-23-2003) on page A21. But not until the second-from-last paragraph in the article does the writer, Ahmed Rashid, mention that Afghan officials are criticizing the Bush Administration for his lack of support. Nowhere in the article does he raise issue with what Emara called the failure of the United States’ war on terrorism in that country.
“The whole public concept of fighting terrorism is wrong,”
said Emara. “The media reported the war against the Taliban as a success story.
By no standards can this be a success story in terms of fighting terrorism.”
“The media’s role is to be the critical eye of society,” Emara added. “The job requires rigor and a continuing element of scrutiny.”
