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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (98030)	5/12/2003 8:08:28 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The US media veered between the cheerleading announcers and the embeds, who magnified any little firefight that they were personally witnessing into the Battle of the Bulge. Definitely did not give the impression of a cakewalk all the way through. Definitely did give a more accurate impression than the BBC's promised quagmires. The BBC's two or three sides tended to give: Iraqi suffering, coalition setbacks, and Arab regime seething and whining, take your pick. However they omitted the most important side: that the coalition was winning fast and skillfully. Again, shouldn't we all count this as a black mark against a news organization?

To: JohnM who wrote (98030)	5/12/2003 8:25:08 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

".....But just as the war in Iraq divided the country, the nation's news organizations are being assailed from the left and the right. Some critics say they served as cheerleaders for the Pentagon propaganda machine. Other critics say they were too negative about a stunningly successful war effort. Still others say they glossed over Iraq's civilian casualties. And even some news executives say the real-time reports from the field provided misleading snapshots of how the war was going...... .....Critics, meanwhile, ripped the tone of the coverage as too hyper, too impatient, too speculative, too filled with what Rumsfeld called the media's "mood swings." "There were moments when the general coverage got pretty negative and the people running the government got prickly about it," said MSNBC President Erik Sorenson, who tried to rein in the speculation. "There is a fog of propaganda, no doubt." Kathryn Kross, CNN's Washington bureau chief, maintains that "journalists serve their audience by being appropriately skeptical. If viewers are after cheerleading, they're looking in the wrong place. It doesn't mean we're not patriotic." Fox News Vice President John Moody faults the manic-depressive approach: "We maybe made some snap judgments, such as 'This is a cakewalk.' 'Oh my God, we're bogged down.' 'Will we ever reach Baghdad?' 'How did Baghdad fall so easily?' Some networks were a little down at the mouth and ready to declare unilateral surrender." At Fox, Moody said, "there were moments when I wanted to make sure we did not cheerlead," such as barring correspondents from referring to "good guys" and "bad guys." At the same time, CBS News President Andrew Heyward dismisses criticism that media outlets were too "jingoistic" in their coverage. "American journalists are rooting for America to win," he said. "You're not going to find a lot of Americans rooting for Iraq. That doesn't mean they're not objective and fair in their reporting....." washingtonpost.com