Wartime Media: Choosing Sides

If you’re not already tired of wall-to-wall war coverage, I admire you. But you also scare me a little.

Anyone who has been with me on a trip of some sort knows full well my appetite for news — I’ve been known to consume upwards of four newspapers a day on Wesley Spring Tours. (Right, Amy? ;-)
But when it comes to this war coverage, I have to call timeout after an hour or two. Even last Friday on my way from DC to Blacksburg, with both tactical and strategic situations very fluid, I quit hopping between BBC World Service, ABC News, and WTOP about ten miles north of Harrisonburg. I was better off turning off the radio, rolling down the windows, and enjoying the beautiful Shenandoah Valley spring day I was driving through.

Part of what makes this war’s media so difficult to tolerate is the clear ideological bias in almost every news organization’s coverage. In a domestic political environment so charged that even the Senate Minority Leader feels it’s okay to undermine troops’ confidence in their Commander-in-Chief on the eve of war, I suppose one can’t reasonably expect reporters to lay their biases aside when given such a large opportunity to reach viewers. On the international scene, it’s even worse, of course. (You may have noticed that the “blogchalk” icon I had along the main page’s left column disappeared a couple of days ago. I deleted it upon discovering that the Portuguese guy who came up with the concept thought it would be cute to post in his own weblog, under the heading “F@#$ USA,” an American flag with the stars arranged in a swastika pattern. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever drive traffic to a site like that.)

But given that I do occasionally want news, I have to make choices on who I want to trust, and precisely how far I want to trust them. First I’ll make some general observations over the nature of coverage, and then I’ll rate several popular news sources individually.

• The value of the “embedded reporters” is highly suspect. They give us some unbelievable pictures (several have been shot at during live broadcasts), but at best they know about as much about the full shape of the war as the average sergeant in their unit — which isn’t much.
  Several lefty warbloggers have complained that these guys present an overly friendly image of the military; well, compared to the image you guys prefer to present (that of all military members as bloodthirsty psychopaths) yeah. One right-wing warblogger (a link for whom I unfortunately cannot find) took this analysis a bit further, wondering if this wasn’t actually a play toward future positive coverage of the military, attempting to build sympathetic links between mostly young journalists and individual servicemen and -women. The operative principle here would be that it’s an awful lot harder to call an entire group of people “baby-killers” if you have actually been out in the field with them, instead of spending your formative years as a reporter covering idiots blocking streets in NYC and San Francisco. I’m not sure I buy this, but it’d be a rather prescient (if cynical) move if someone actually did promote this program on that basis.
• Beware hyperbole. Anyone who uses words like “quagmire” or starts comparing this war to Vietnam after eight days has an axe to grind. That, by the way, includes military commentators such as these. Again borrowing another blogger’s thought, there’s always going to be someone in the Pentagon whose initial plan didn’t get used, and who is irritated about it.
• Those nifty little graphical maps of Iraq showing troop positions? There’s a reason nobody can find one they really like, that they think is completely accurate. The most accurate maps of Iraq you’ll find are in CentCom, and they’re not inclined to share, because it’ll get our men killed.
• And, though this may seem like counter-intuitive advice: don’t trust the bloggers all that much, either. Blogspace is good at applying a lot of brainpower to whatever information it gets fed, but right now, it’s mostly being fed crap like everyone else. To break out the CS 1044 terminology: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Bad input is going to generate bad output no matter how heavily it’s processed and/or spun.

And now, to the individual news sources.

• CNN is trying a lot harder to be fair in this war than I’ve seen them try in other political situations. Usually you can rely on them to take an American hard-left line (which would be left-center to most Europeans), but they’re not quite as bad in this go-round.
• The BBC has been a special target of many right-wing bloggers’ ire, and with good reason. The BBC often takes a moderate-to-hard-left line on solely British subjects, and its war coverage has been peculiarly defeatist — almost as if it would like to break into open hostility like the French press, but it just can’t quite bring itself to that point. Even British anti-war newspaper The Guardian has taken notice of the BBC’s internal battles over this. Despite all this, I probably listen to them the most of any particular radio/TV source, just because they’re programmed into preset number 1 on my XM radio, and because I know that if I’m hearing good news from them, it’s darn well true.
• Al-Jazeera? I’ll let let LGF handle this one, thank you. I would simply add to that that if Al-Jazeera really is as representative of Arabic public opinion as CNN is of American opinion (minus a little bit of Ted Turner spin), we’ve got a lot of “hearts and minds” work to do, and a successful Iraq will only be the start of it.
• Fox News is pretty decent, if a bit over the top at times. The real value of Fox News is that they break some stories ahead of the other American networks, likely because the current U.S. administration trusts them more than the others. I wouldn’t want them to be my only source, but they’re useful.
• Of the so-called “big three” of U.S. broadcast TV (CBS/NBC/ABC), NBC is probably the best, just because it has the additional resources of MSNBC and CNBC to fill in the gaps. I actually watched more MSNBC than anything last week in DC, because they were less overtly liberal even than the toned-down CNN, and more in-depth than Fox.
• In the newspaper division, the Washington Post just runs away with the title. It’s not even close between them and the New York Times, largely (I think) because the Post has so far been about the most neutral of all the big media players, and the Times has become increasingly ideological across the board under executive editor Howell Raines (as evidenced in its most petty form when he spiked Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Dave Anderson last year for disagreeing with the editorial page’s anti-Masters stance).

I guess what it all boils down to is: whereever and whenever you get your news, take a deep breath. This isn’t a sporting event; play-by-play is at best marginally interesting but morally questionable, and at worst extremely misleading.