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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Wildly overplaying the Schiavo protesters, ignoring facts and giving Bush a free ride, the press was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Mar 31, 2005 | It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep.
Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate" nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a "furious debate" when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five Americans agree.
But the "furious debate" angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream.
Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did.
What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned "Schiavo" more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned "tsunami" approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)
Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly, however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days: "You don't have any idea what you are talking about," Cranford said.)
As the story played out on Page 1 nationwide, the press served as a platform for pro-life protesters. They were invited to sound off against tyrannical judges and Nazi-like politicians and denigrate Michael Schiavo at will while reporters eagerly transcribed protesters' personal -- and often outrageous -- attacks, yet never dared to use the word "radical" to describe their actions.
And when it became clear that Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to the unprecedented intervention by Congress and the president, the press quietly looked the other way, once again proving that the Bush White House doesn't have to worry about bad press -- Beltway reporters still seem unwilling, or incapable, of delivering it.
Thursday afternoon, CNN began running a promo for its prime-time Schiavo special, "Life and Death: American Speaks Out." Based on the rapid-fire images in the ad -- one after another of pro-life protesters and spokesmen for various conservative groups -- a better title might have been "Life and Death: America's Conservative Minority Speaks Out."
The Schiavo coverage was reminiscent of what followed the death last year of former President Ronald Reagan, when CNN and other news outlets simply handed over their airtime to conservatives for days at a time.
The Schiavo coverage started off with a strikingly deferential tone. For instance, on March 22 CNN's John King, interviewing Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, "You say Congress has the authority. I don't think anyone questions that, that Congress has the authority to grant federal jurisdiction for this case, if you will." That statement was false -- legions of legal scholars have noted that Congress has no authority to pass legislation in a specific legal case that effectively trumps state court findings.
Again and again CNN in particular seemed to do its best to accommodate the Pinellas Park noisemakers. Last week host Miles O'Brien adopted pro-life protesters' language and began referring to Michael Schiavo as the "estranged husband." As Media Matters for America noted, on March 24, CNN host Daryn Kagan said there are "a lot of people in this country agreeing with [pro-life protesters] that this would be a death without dignity." Kagan added that there are "strong, divided opinions across the country." Yet poll after poll showed that Americans were not strongly divided on this issue, and that most did not believe removing Schiavo's feeding tube would mean death without dignity.
