From FAIR (see below)
It appears that one of the FOX/NPR reporters, Juan Williams, may be
part of the reality-based community, at least part of the time - the
other FOX?NPR reporter Mara Liasson, is doing a better job in
fulfilling her responsibilities as a member of the propaganda arm of
the executive branch of government.
I am curious if there was any good coverage on NPR (which wasn't
mentioned in the FAIR report) or did they treat the protests (if
mentioned at all) in the manner that they treat people who are
concerned about electoral theft, thinking about moving to Canada
because of creeping totalitarianism, or support Cindy Sheehan - that
is, with scorn and ridicule?
I'm killing a little time in an Internet Cafe in Melbourne, Australia.
Got a chance to read a little news. The papers aren't so very
different than in the states (and what would you expect from a place
where Rupert Murdock got his start) but the
readers are sure better. The letters to the editor are so well
informed. Dictatorship (under the guise of anti-terrorism) is
overcoming Australia as it is in the states and England, but in
Australia they realize it, and they aren't afraid to speak out about
it. Admirable.
Disappearing Antiwar Protests
Media shrug off mass movement against war
9/27/05
Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the
Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest
demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C.
on Saturday.
But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the
protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the
only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC
Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words. (ABC
World News Tonight transcripts were not available for September 24,
possibly due to pre-emption by college football.)
Cable coverage wasn't much better. CNN, for example, made only passing
references to the weekend protests. CNN anchor Aaron Brown offered an
interesting explanation (9/24/05):
"There was a huge 100,000 people in Washington protesting the war in
Iraq today, and I sometimes today feel like I've heard from all
100,000 upset that they did not get any coverage, and it's true they
didn't get any coverage. Many of them see conspiracy. I assure you
there is none, but it's just the national story today and the national
conversation today is the hurricane that put millions and millions of
people at risk, and it's just kind of an accident of bad timing, and I
know that won't satisfy anyone but that's the truth of it."
To hear Brown tell it, a 24-hour cable news channel is somehow unable
to cover more than one story at a time-- and the "national
conversation" is something that CNN just listens in on, rather than
helping to determine through its coverage choices.
The following day (9/25/05), the network's Sunday morning shows had an
opportunity to at least reflect on the significance of the anti-war
movement. With a panel consisting of three New York Times columnists,
Tim Russert mentioned the march briefly in one question to Maureen
Dowd-- which ended up being about how the antiwar movement might
affect Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential chances.
On ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos observed, "We've seen
polls across the board suggesting that we're bogged down now in Iraq
and now you have this growing protest movement. Do you believe that
we're reaching a tipping point in public opinion?" That question was
put to pro-war Republican Sen. John McCain, who responded by
inaccurately claiming: "Most polls I see, that most Americans believe
still that we have to stay the course.... I certainly understand the
dissatisfaction of the American people but I think most of them still
want to stay the course and we have to."
A recent CBS/New York Times poll (9/9-13/05) found 52 percent support
for leaving Iraq "as soon as possible." A similar Gallup poll
(9/16-18) found that 33 percent of the public want some troops
withdrawn, with another 30 percent wanting all the troops withdrawn.
Only 34 percent wanted to maintain or increase troop levels--positions
that could be described as wanting to "stay the course."
Stephanopoulos, however, failed to challenge McCain's false claim.
(An L.A. Times recap of the protests--9/25/05-- included a misleading
reference to the Gallup poll, reporting that while the war is seen as
a "mistake" by 59 percent of respondents, "There remains, however,
widespread disagreement about the best solution. The same poll showed
that 30 percent of Americans favored a total troop withdrawal, though
26 percent favored maintaining the current level." By leaving out the
33 percent of those polled who wanted to decrease troop numbers, the
paper gave a misleading impression of closely divided opinion.)
On Fox News Sunday (9/25/05), panelist Juan Williams was rebuked by
his colleagues when he noted that public opinion had turned in favor
of pulling out of Iraq. Fellow Fox panelist and NPR reporter Mara
Liasson responded, "Oh, I don't think that's true," a sentiment echoed
by Fox panelist Brit Hume. When Williams brought up the Saudi foreign
minister's statement that foreign troops were not helping to stabilize
Iraq, panelist William Kristol retorted: "So now the American left is
with the House of Saud." (That was, if anything, a more complimentary
take on the protesters than was found in Fox's news reporting, when
White House correspondent Jim Angle-- 9/26/05-- referred to them as
"disparate groups united by their hatred of President Bush, in
particular, and U.S. policies in general.")
Another feature of the protest coverage was a tendency to treat a tiny
group of pro-war hecklers as somehow equivalent to the massive
anti-war gathering. NBC's Today show (9/25/05) had a report that gave
a sentence to each: "Opponents and supporters of the war marched in
cities across the nation on Saturday. In the nation's capital an
estimated 100,000 war protestors marched near the White House. A few
hundreds supporters of the war lined the route in a
counterdemonstration."
Reports on NBC Nightly News and CBS Sunday Morning were similarly
"balanced," and a September 26 USA Today report gave nearly equal
space to the counter-demonstrators and their concerns, though the
paper reported that their pro-war rally attracted just 400
participants (that is, less than half of 1 percent of the number of
antiwar marchers).
In a headline that summed up the absurdity of this type of coverage,
the Washington Post reported (9/25/05): "Smaller but Spirited Crowd
Protests Antiwar March; More Than 200 Say They Represent Majority."
Perhaps this "crowd" felt that way because they've grown accustomed to
a media system that so frequently echoes their views, while keeping
antiwar voices--representing the actual majority opinion--off the
radar.
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Elliot Mincberg on John Roberts & David Enders on Iraq Withdrawal
(9/23/05-9/29/05)
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