Salon: Too much about memos, too little about war

[kskiska]

As the election nears, will TV news finally get tough and really cover the Iraq war?

By Eric Boehlert

With the war in Iraq emerging this week as perhaps the defining issue of the presidential campaign, news reports from the region take on added significance, helping voters sort out their feelings about the war. It's too soon to know how the all-news channels and television networks will play the Iraq story between now and the election, whether they'll show some skepticism toward positive White House forecasts about the situation in Iraq or revert to perfunctory dispatches, dutifully noting the latest roadside bombings, found in so much of their coverage over the summer. But for now at least, as more questions arise about Iraq's future, there are signs of a new, more realistic brand of reporting.

CNN's Wolf Blitzer this week described Iraq as a "daily bloodbath," while the on-screen graphic for a segment during CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" on Wednesday read: "The Wreck That's Iraq." Networks are also doing more fact checking. On ABC's "World News Tonight," Peter Jennings highlighted a statement by the president in which Bush said that John Kerry had proclaimed "the world was better off with Saddam in power," and said, "I strongly disagree." ABC then played a clip of what Kerry had actually said: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not ... in and of itself, a reason to go to war." (But when White House communications director Dan Bartlett made the same baseless charge about Kerry's view of Saddam during an interview this week with CNN's Judy Woodruff, she responded rather meekly, "I don't know if that's exactly what he said.")

(snip)

Broadcast journalism's continued gradual awakening to Iraq might put an end to the odd inverse relationship that developed over the summer between the amount of Iraq news and the number of U.S. casualties: As more and more U.S. troops were killed, there seemed to be less and less TV news coverage. In June, 42 U.S. soldiers were killed; in July, 54; in August, 66. September's tally is projected to be around 75, making it the third-deadliest month since the occupation of Iraq began more than a year ago.

(snip)

Sometimes, the cable channels just don't seem to want to focus on the negative. Over a three-day period this week, when there was shocking news that two more Americans had been beheaded by terrorists while the killers' cameras rolled, CNN, MSNBC and Fox combined had just 221 mentions of the beheadings while they made 1,636 mentions of the CBS memo controversy.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/24/iraq_media/index.html