Simon Houpt: 'On the brink of the Cronkite moment'
Posted on Sunday, May 09 @ 09:18:24 EDT It's beginning to feel like 1968, when the Vietnam War was first challenged by a till-then compliant U.S. media
By Simon Houpt, Toronto Globe and Mail
NEW YORK -- Supporters of the current Iraq war oppose comparisons to the American campaign in Vietnam, but there is one area of blossoming similarities: the U.S. media coverage.
As with Vietnam, the mainstream American news media was initially compliant in its handling of the Iraq war. At a prewar press conference in March, 2003, television and print reporters submitted themselves to stage-managing by a White House intent on convincing the public of the necessity of invasion. There and elsewhere, they failed to strongly challenge administration estimates on the cost of the war, in both human and economic terms. In the months leading up to the U.S. offensive, reporters across the country, working from fact sheets distributed by the White House, published thousands of stories detailing the chemical and biological weapons of Saddam Hussein.
In February, 1968, Walter Cronkite returned to New York after observing the Tet Offensive, and pronounced the Vietnam war unwinnable. The broadcast is said to have been a signal moment in the Johnson administration's attitude toward the war. "If I've lost Cronkite," Johnson reportedly told an aide, "I've lost middle America."
Journalism professors and other media watchers today agree that the U.S. media is searching for its own Cronkite voice, inching away from the gentle naiveté that characterized its early coverage of U.S. foreign policy after Sept. 11, 2001, and stepping up its challenge of the Bush administration.
The first sharp shock came at the beginning of last month when some newspapers, spurred by international competition from the Internet, satellite television channels, and an increasingly restless and skeptical American public, published front-page photographs taken during the spontaneous celebrations in Fallujah when four American military contractors were killed and their corpses brutalized.
Two weeks later, The Seattle Times published a photo, banned by the Department of Defence, of 20 flag-draped coffins aboard a transport plane headed from Kuwait to the United States. Over the wishes of the Pentagon, other newspapers quickly followed suit when the website The Memory Hole released 361 similar images it had obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Last week, on the one-year anniversary of President Bush's statement that "major combat operations" had ended, in a program perceived by some as a slap in the face to the White House, ABC News's Nightline broadcast a 40-minute, commercial-free special entitled The Fallen, consisting only of the names and photos, when available, of the 721 soldiers to have died in the Iraq conflict.
The special came two days after CBS News broadcast a report on the abuses by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, and three days before a report in The New Yorker hit newsstands with more revelations and photographs of Iraqi prisoner mistreatment, news thatforced President Bush to offer an apology this week.
But the blood in the water hasn't launched a feeding frenzy among reporters. Indeed, it appears as if the U.S. news media is in a Hamlet moment, caught between a desire to act and the fear of consequences.
CBS in fact sat on its report for two weeks at the request of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, before the fear of being scooped led it to broadcast the story. The San Francisco Chronicle accompanied its publication of the Abu Ghraib photos with an brief explanatory note on the front page, as if to pre-empt criticism. Though CNN repeatedly broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos this week, it has frequently played down Iraqi civilian casualties. Two broadcasting companies pulled out of carrying their feed of ABC in a total of 11 local markets during the broadcast of The Fallen. One issued a statement saying it felt the program was "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."
And on Fox News, frequently friendlier toward the administration than other networks, anchor Bill O'Reilly Wednesday evening dismissed the abuse at Abu Ghraib as the anomalous action of a few bad apples in the U.S. military, and used the occasion to take shots at France for not supporting the war. Tomorrow morning on the same network, Chris Wallace, who called ABC's broadcast of The Fallen "a stunt," will host a program on the positive developments in Iraq.
Historians say the current confused stance of the U.S. media -- characterized by a desire to remain respectful while moving toward a new aggressiveness -- has precedent in other American wars. When support for the Vietnam War began to fall away, the U.S. media questioned the Johnson administration's aims. In this view, Cronkite wasn't just reporting what he saw during the Tet Offensive, he was channelling the disenchantment out in the heartland.
"The public led the way and the media was right behind them, and the same is probably true today," said Michael Sweeney, a professor of journalism at Utah State University and the author of Secrets of Victory, a history of censorship during the Second World War.
A poll this week conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal reports that now 47 per cent of Americans feel the cost of deposing Saddam Hussein was too high, against 42 per cent who disagree.
The changing mood means newspapers and TV networks may not be risking economic hardship if they publish bad news. "There's a great fear that news outlets will be seen as unpatriotic by advertisers, who are the people who pay the bills in American media, and they are the ones who determine what the limits of acceptable expression are," said Jim Naureckas, a magazine editor at the liberal media watchdog FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
But media organizations have to watch their flanks and maintain the trust of their audience that they are still interested in delivering the news. If a story breaks on Al-Jazeera or the BBC -- both available in the U.S. via cable, satellite and the Internet -- it can't easily be ignored. Similarly, private citizens operating websites that release information against government wishes put pressure on the mainstream press to follow the stories.
Some see the questioning as anti-American, but not everyone agrees. "It's good for people to know reality," says FAIR's Jim Naureckas. "Certainly a nation that thinks it should ignore reality if it might change minds about political policy, is going to wind up supporting some policies that will run it into very serious problems in the world."
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
Reprinted from The Toronto Globe and Mail: |
