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As the election nears, will TV news finally get tough and really cover the Iraq war?
Sep 24, 2004 | With the war in Iraq emerging this week as perhaps the defining issue of the presidential campaign, news reports from the region take on added significance, helping voters sort out their feelings about the war. It's too soon to know how the all-news channels and television networks will play the Iraq story between now and the election, whether they'll show some skepticism toward positive White House forecasts about the situation in Iraq or revert to perfunctory dispatches, dutifully noting the latest roadside bombings, found in so much of their coverage over the summer. But for now at least, as more questions arise about Iraq's future, there are signs of a new, more realistic brand of reporting.
CNN's Wolf Blitzer this week described Iraq as a "daily bloodbath," while the on-screen graphic for a segment during CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" on Wednesday read: "The Wreck That's Iraq." Networks are also doing more fact checking. On ABC's "World News Tonight," Peter Jennings highlighted a statement by the president in which Bush said that John Kerry had proclaimed "the world was better off with Saddam in power," and said, "I strongly disagree." ABC then played a clip of what Kerry had actually said: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not ... in and of itself, a reason to go to war." (But when White House communications director Dan Bartlett made the same baseless charge about Kerry's view of Saddam during an interview this week with CNN's Judy Woodruff, she responded rather meekly, "I don't know if that's exactly what he said.")
Last week's bloodletting in Iraq, which killed hundreds -- combined with a new CIA analysis that refused to rule out the eruption of a civil war in Iraq, Bush's high-profile address to the United Nations, and Sen. John Kerry's daily Iraq-related attacks on the Bush administration -- has brought the issue back to television's center stage. "They're beginning to show a little more [about Iraq]," says Yvonne Haddad, a professor of the history of Islam at Georgetown University.
According to a search of TVEyes, the database of television news, for each consecutive week this month, Iraq garnered increasing mentions on all-news cable channels and the three major networks. For instance, on MSNBC during the week of Sept. 5-11, Iraq was referenced 464 times. The next week the number grew to 542 mentions. And as of Thursday morning, this week's Iraq tally was already up to 774.
With more press attention to Iraq comes more public attention. According to a September poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 47 percent of Americans are paying close attention to news about Iraq, compared with 39 percent in August, among the lowest levels of the past year. And there is a clear connection between how closely Americans pay attention to Iraq and Bush's standing in the polls; the less attention people pay to Iraq, the better Bush does.
Critics of the media, though, insist that despite any recent strides, TV news outlets have a long way to go to provide truly thorough coverage of Iraq. "Print people are doing a better job of explaining what's going on," says Dow Smith, associate professor of broadcast journalism at Syracuse University. "Networks haven't done that kind of explaining piece. They've relied too much on, 'Today a suicide bomber killed this many Iraqis.' The networks' mentality of a 30-minute newscast doesn't fit the situation in Iraq. You'd think the 24-hour cable channels would be filling that role, but they haven't stepped up, either. I watch the cable channels and fume. None of them are doing a good job with perspective and background on Iraq."
Part of the shortcomings in coverage stems from the physical strains of trying to report from inside Iraq, where journalists no longer feel safe going out among the local population and instead confine themselves to the relatively secure hotels, where TV correspondents tape their satellite feeds. As the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran told readers during an online chat Wednesday, "The roads are too dangerous, the threat of kidnapping too great. We spend a lot of time sitting in our hotels and relying on the reporting of our very brave Iraqi local staff. It's not great for us and it's not great for our readers, but it's the best we can do under the circumstances."
At the same time, U.S. news outlets remain reluctant to pick up footage shot by Arab-run outlets such as Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, which often capture more graphic and timely footage. Consequently, when comparing Arab and U.S. television newscasts, "a totally divergent story about Iraq comes out," says Asad Abukhalil, professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus. (The last time Arab footage received wide exposure in the United States was when an Al-Arabiya correspondent was killed on the air after being hit by U.S. rocket fire last week.)
Another factor limiting U.S. coverage is that television news organizations, after amassing enormous resources for the invasion of Iraq, cut back too quickly, not anticipating an extended aftermath that proved deadlier than the major combat. "I don't think networks are represented well enough in Iraq, numerically or qualitatively," says Robert Zelnick, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University and a former Pentagon correspondent for ABC News. "So they're reduced to doing reports from the rooftop of their hotel, which is not adequate."
