ABC, CNN, CBS, FOX, and
NBC on the Frontlines
Dr. Olugbenga Christopher Ayeni
Eastern Connecticut State University
Over the years, the media have
become reliable sources of information on events and happenings from far and
near. Agenda setting scholars corroborate the fact that our dependence on the
media for news and information has shaped and reinforced our perceptions of the
world around us. The mass media continue to set the news agenda for dominant
events, issues and policies that subsequently become popular in our social
discourse.
Media professionals’
credibility is gauged by their objectivity and detachment, reflected in the
level of transparency exhibited in subject selection, treatment, packaging, and
dissemination of news. (Watkins, 2001) However, selection packaging and
processing of such news stories are subject to, and mediated by organizational
gate keeping, ideological slant, power relations, self censorship and sometimes
outright bias.
All of these can be subsumed
under framing, or the process of negotiating, interpreting and assigning
meanings to a complex world in a manner that gives us a better understanding.
After all, news has been described as a manufactured product and by implication
each news product is bound to bear a unique and specific stamp of identity and
quality depending on who is rendering it. (Chomsky, 1988, Tuchman, 1978)
The purpose of this chapter
is to scrutinize the second Iraqi war in light of attendant uproar that preceded
the hostilities, the hype and anticipation that heralded the war of “shock and
awe”, and the unique challenge thrust upon the embedded journalists. The
journalist carries the onerous responsibility of interpreting our sometimes
unintelligible world in a manner that provides some sanity and direction.
However, this task is not made easier by the interplaying factors of personal
judgments of news selection, organizational and ideological pressures which lead
to framing the discourse. The scope of the information and the speed of its
processing, which are triggered by time pressures, necessitate the need for
assigning the information into cognitive categories. (Gitlin, 1980).
In an attempt to present the
news and to make sense of our world journalists select, organize and emphasize
some aspects of the world reality while ignoring some others. It is these
“patterns of presentations, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion” that is known
as framing. (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7). Entman (1993) says: “Framing essentially
involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a
perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a
way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral
evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” (p. @@@@ )
The Iraq war news dominated
the mass media months before hostilities began in Baghdad. Tagged the “war of
shock and awe”, the second war in Iraq was for several months, and still is, the
dominant news menu months after President Bush declared victory in May, 2003.
This study looks at issues from a trifocal dimension of the news coverage before
and during war, the role of Washington power brokers in influencing what gets
reported, and the role of the embedded reporter in the selection of sources and
what eventually gets into public view. In the days and months preceding the war,
there were the wild and wide protests that trailed the news of the impending war
against Iraq. The United States was criticized by some for not exploring fully
the diplomatic recourse to resolving the melee while others argued that going
after Saddam Hussein over veiled speculations that he had piles of WMD was
rather a brazen act of aggression on the part of a blood thirsty administration.
Concurrently there was the propaganda machinery of power brokers in Washington
bent on fanning the embers of war through a process of media “demonization” of
Saddam Hussein.
Protest rallies were held in
many world capitals by anti war activists and it may well have been one war that
attracted the most vociferous criticisms from far and near. There is always a
conflict in the news media’s choices of news frames amply demonstrated by the
opposing stances taken by the forces in favor of collective action in the forms
of protests, and those of the authorities who wanted to project the status quo
frame of law and order. (Wolsfeld, Avraham & Isam, 2000).
The media serve messages to
their audiences with a view to conveying realities to them using specific frames
of references. Beneath the media messages and the associated meanings deciphered
by the receiving audience reside the underlying roles of the reporter’s frames
through selection or omission of some aspects of reality. It is such selection,
omission or emphasis, also known as salience that “set boundaries on the
interpretation of an event.” (Phalen & Elgan, 2001 p. 302)
Journalists carry their
individual biases and are further burdened by journalistic norms and deadlines,
search for scoops and other contingent factors that limit the scope of
understanding for the message. This is a result of the salience, emphasis or
lack of it, that often accompanies any message or text. Entman (1993) emphasizes
the view that what is excluded from a story or a text is equally as important as
what was said. Salience is thus achieved through “highlighting bits of
information through placement, repetition, and associating them with culturally
familiar symbols”. (Entman, p. 53)
This paper employs the use of
textual analysis of frames and qualitative content analysis to study the
reliance of the news networks on different sources for information about the
war. The selected networks are Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC which were chosen to
provide a mix of cable news channel and broadcast channels. The period of the
study spans three phases namely, before, during and after the hostilities. The
data for this study was collected from the transcripts of news casts collected
from Lexis-Nexis Academic.
Research questions that come
to mind are: How extensive was the coverage of the war in Iraq, especially by
the selected television networks? Which sources were relied upon by the news
media for the news that we were served as the viewers on the war? Based on the
sources used how much balance was shown in the use of these sources? How far did
the viewpoints of those sources coincide with those of the power brokers in
Washington to further their propaganda agenda?
Media coverage of wars has
come a long way to what it is today where embedded reporters and the magic of
technology bring real time actions and images from the battle front to our
living rooms. The reports and the coverage of the American civil war relied
predominantly on still photography while the First and Second World Wars
exploited the mobilizing role of radio to rally support and give account of the
battles. It was not until the Vietnam War, the first truly televised war, that
television took the frontlines.
The Vietnam War also granted
unlimited access to the battlefront by reporters and images from the battle
front further deepened the resentments and protests against the war at home.
Whereas the news scene for the coverage of the first Iraqi war, tagged “Dessert
Storm”, was dominated by the CNN, aided by doctored Pentagon input, the most
recent war was pretty open, especially for journalists who wanted to be embedded
with the troop formations for the purpose of close real time coverage.
The new role of the embedded
journalists has been matched by the technological advance in the immediacy of
news coverage and delivery. The fact that reporters can now feed live stories to
the news rooms from battle fronts has brought a new dimension to war coverage, a
trend referred to as “militainment” by Schwartz (2003). The excitement and drama
of live war coverage has its benefits and its downsides. While images of the
battle front filter into our living rooms live, gory details sometimes pass
through to the audiences and further dull our sensitivities or make us recoil in
anger.
It is therefore necessary to
look at the issue of news selection, choice of sources relied upon and the
language used in most of the news stories that came out of Baghdad during the
ongoing war in Iraq. The literature on news selection or framing is as wide as
there are topics. They have been organized into two major areas namely: issue
specific and generic news frames (de Vreeese, 1999). Whereas issue specific news
framing focuses on specific events or news items and allow for a more detailed
insight, generic news frames are broader in scope and may span different times
and contexts. (p.108).This article belongs in the category of issue specific
frames since the scope is limited solely to the coverage of a specific issue,
the war in Iraq.
Western media have often been
condemned for a lopsided view of the world outside of their immediate
environment, citing jaundiced reporting and framing among other reasons for that
lapse. This argument rests on the premise that the Western media enjoy a
political-economic advantage over the less developed world such that events that
happen in the latter region are either framed negatively to fit the hegemonic
view of the elites or ignored altogether. (Phalen & Elgan, 2001). The interplay
of power, politics and the systematic process of social stratification of news
is evident in news processing mechanisms often adopted by the Western media, and
calls for closer scrutiny.
Scholars use news frame
analysis to underscore the all embracing power of meaning conveyed by the texts
or message. The frames so selected by the reporters elicit the impact of the
messages on the recipients, their understanding, interpretation, and response to
the text. This is because journalists in the process of framing the news
organize their messages in contexts that articulate specific meanings.
“The
frames of a news portrait can be enlarged so that media reports may penetrate
the consciousness of a mass public that is minimally aware of most specific
issues and events. Or the frame can be shrunk to miniaturize an event,
diminishing the amount, prominence, and duration of coverage, and thus mass
awareness.” (Entman, 1991, p.10).
Audiences rely on the issues
presented in the media to form the basis for their comprehension of the world
around them. However, in the process of creating this reality and ultimately
impacting the interpretation of the recipients of the messages, the underlying
roles played by the reporters in the way the messages are framed need attention.
Selection or omission of those issues that constitute the news frames shape
perception of the audiences in forming their reality, and such selection,
emphasis, or omission, also referred to as salience, “sets boundaries on the
interpretation of an event.” (Phalen, p. 302). Salience is achieved through
“highlighting bits of information through placement, repetition, and associating
them with culturally familiar symbols.” (Entman, 1993, pp. 51-58)
Many factors are responsible
for issue salience or framing in news processing and they include individual
journalist’s biases, institutional limitations set by the news organizations,
journalistic norms, deadlines, or the overbearing influence of official news
sources. All of these factors set to limit real and true understanding of
reality and since every event or issue is bound to have more than one angle to
it, the few specifics selected by a journalist cannot constitute the whole
picture. What is excluded from a story or text is equally as important as what
is actually said in the story. (p.53).
The premise of analyzing the
sources relied upon by the network news in the Iraq war is based on the
assumption that the current war in Iraq, unlike any before it, relied heavily on
the military for access to the battle front. When the mass media are involved in
the coverage of hostilities between their state and another, reliance on the
military, and domestic elite sources within the government, become almost
inevitable.
News media organizations rely
on sources for diversity in perspectives to bring in views from all those likely
to lend new insights into events or issues. (Reese et al, 1994). In many cases,
the mass media tend to impose self censorship on themselves when it comes to the
issue of conflict or hostilities between the one state and another. In hostile
environments such as during wars or military expeditions, the government
resiliently protects its forte under the guise of protecting national security.
The government position is that an “untrammeled media may stab the military in
the back, and that unregulated images generate intrinsically anti-war effects.
As a result states have taken considerable pains to manipulate the presentation
of war.”(Carruthers, 2000, p. 9).
The
reliance of the news networks is made more inescapable by the many constraints
that accompany the coverage of hostilities. Many reporters need the military
protection to be able to reach the hot spots on the battle ground. When one
looks at the bits and pieces of information that the reporters send in from the
frontlines, the analysis by selected experts, and a high dosage of Pentagon
briefings, whatever is served the audience becomes a blurry representation.
Donald Rumsfeld referred to the stories out of Iraq as “slices” of news,
suggesting that there are bound to be ambiguities and hidden news elements.
“You
take every bit of information that you have from embeds, and you treat it as a
tiny slice of the battlefield. You compare that to what you’re getting from the
military briefings, al Jazeera, Iraq Television, and every other conceivable
source and you weigh each piece depending on the source, and talk to your
analysts. Then you drop it all in a big bag, shake it up, and hope that what you
come up with is some sort of clarity.” (McClellan, 2003, p 1)
The influential role of news
sources in the process of inventing reality compel an examination of the sources
relied upon by the news networks during the war in Iraq. According to Carruthers,
“Reporters don’t necessarily make the news but their sources, their
organizations and other framework in which they operate “manufacture” news and
thus invent reality.” (Carruthers, 2000, p. 17). News organizations in the
United States have been accused of closely following state bureaucratic
structures and most of the Gulf War stories of 1991 actually relied on a
triangular model of the Pentagon, White House and the State department. (Carruthers,
2000).
The selected networks NBC,
FOX, ABC, CNN and CBS were chosen to get a feel for the coverage of the news
since majority of Americans receive their evening news through one or more of
these sources. Los Angeles Times poll results showed that 70% of Americans got
most of their news from cable-TV. “Nielsen data showed that the number of
average daily viewers for MSNBC and CNN increased more than 300% during the war,
Fox (the most viewed cable news channel) more than 288%.” (Hiebert, 2003, p.
252) The time frame for the news casts was prime time from eight at night to 10
p.m. CNN had always pioneered in the area of 24 hour news coverage and it was
important to review the perspectives presented by the leader of cable news
network. News casts were grouped into three major phases from October 2002
through March, 2004.
The first phase contains news
stories covered in the run off to the hostilities. Most of the pre-war reports
of the protests needed to be within the database to determine if there is any
link between the news coverage of the war protests and the news that were
covered during the hostilities. The last phase covers the news stories of events
following the official cessation of hostilities in May, 2003, when George Bush
declared “victory”. Since his victory speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, over
400 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, underscoring the fact that the war in
Iraq is still relevant in not just news coverage but also in policy decisions
post Saddam Hussein.
Data was collected from early
to late evening news casts for the five news networks namely ABC World News
Tonight, CBS Evening News, CNN News with Aaron Brown, NBC Nightly News, ABC, and
Fox Special Report. The primary unit of analysis for the study is news on the
Iraq war. The main focus of the study is the sources cited, interviewed or
featured in discussion sessions during the telecasts by all the networks during
the period under study. These sources were categorized, counted, compared, and
analyzed. Identified news sources are categorized into official, unofficial,
military, non-military and experts.
The hypothesis is that the
sources selected for interviews, discussions, and opinion expression would
signal the news tilt of the news networks. Official sources are those that
represent the viewpoints of the United States government representatives and
other government representatives of other countries considered allies in the war
in Iraq. Unofficial sources are those viewpoints expressed by others who are not
in government or who do not claim to express the views of the government. Other
categories are those that dealt with expert sources, or those who were presumed
to be competent on social issues as a result of their experience or role in
other spheres of life.
The study sought to determine
the reliance of the selected news media on sources and determine if the choices
of the sources could be linked to the framing or salience of the issues covered
by these news organizations. All the sources interviewed or cited in the evening
news segments on the war in Iraq presented by the selected networks were
identified and counted. Beyond this, the text of the news was scanned for
context, while the use of certain referents was noted for consistency.
The study of sources is
important because much as the reporters may claim to be objective in their
reports by excluding personal biases, they are sometimes entangled in the web of
source credibility. This is so because sources have their individual preferences
and opinions, expression of which forms the basis of public reality of issues
covered by the mass media. The selection of the sources based on their
preferences and number could skew the issues of the day one way or another and
distort reality. Thus source selection must reflect fairness and balance through
equal coverage. Bias may be created if in covering events and issues, the
reporters fail to reflect divergent composition of the sources cited. Bias is a
“perceived attribute of a news source whereby the individual news source, or the
group the news represents, has a clear, vested interest in a cause or action
relative to maintaining or changing the status quo.” (Rouner, et al, 1999, p.
43).
The sources were identified by
their titles and designations by which they were introduced before the reporters
interviewed them. Each of the sources used for information that served as
resource for presenting the news were grouped based on the categories earlier on
identified. The grouping enabled the researcher to determine which types of
sources were relied upon the most, how often and how balanced were these sources
used in relation to all of the sources that they could possibly have used. The
results were staggering in terms of how dependent the news networks in the
United States relied more on sources close or friendly to the United States in
getting their news.
Over six hundred sources were
identified from the 3597 total news casts for the selected five networks
covering the entire 17 month period under study. This did not include live feeds
from embedded journalists who were stationed in the battle front. NBC’s 176
myriad of sources were made up of a total of 39 official sources or 22.15% while
military sources, including retired and active duty military personnel totaled
29 or 15.9% and the expert sources equaled 15.6% and all other sources including
civilian sources, families of military personnel totaled 23.4%.
The sources used by CNN was
mostly from military personnel, accounting for about 27% of the sources while
official sources provided 21% of the news material, and others like
commentators, civilians from across the world, provided a hefty 42%. This may be
due to the worldwide recognition of CNN and its ability to attract commentaries
from people from far and near who may not necessarily be directly involved with
the hostilities. Fox relied heavily on official sources and has been criticize
for being overtly biased in its war coverage in Iraq. Almost 58% of the sources
used were from the United States government either working for the Pentagon, The
White House, or State Department.
In the case of CBS official
sources of news were use almost 30 % o the time while military sources were used
30% of the time and other sources accounted for 31.3% and Expert sources were
used 12% of the time. In the case of ABC, which had less than the other networks
in terms of coverage of the war, 63% of the news was from official sources while
military and other sources were used 23% and 20 % respectively.
Overall, of the more than 600
sources categorized, official sources accounted for 33% of the news while
military sources accounted for 26% of the news stories. It has been argued that
the media often take sides of the institutionalized sources when it comes to
issue of covering conflicts. This is because the media rely on the convenience
provided by traditional sources of official informants. Invariably, those who
are likely to provide alternative definitions through their critical views will
not just have minimal access but may also be attacked if their commentaries are
considered as unpatriotic. (Avraham, 2000). The hegemonic role of the elite
media and their sources becomes fiercer when there is a perceived threat to the
agenda set forth by the dominant power brokers.
The other striking fact from
the categories of sources was that military sources, which are most certainly
another version of the dominant view of the government in uniform, dominated the
source of our Iraq war news. Close to 30% of the sources were from military
personnel, either speaking in official capacities as representatives of the
state or as analyst of the military exercises. It may be worth considering that
the media selects those sources that are television friendly, not necessarily
those who have something to say but someone who can say it in the most
entertaining way. Schwartz (2003) calls this “militainment”, the reveling in the
suspense, excitement and the drama of war. The example of the “rescue” of former
POW Private Jessica Lynch has been described as a classic case of
made-for-television razzmatazz.
There is almost a conspiracy
theory surrounding the reliance of the news media on sources, and journalists
are wont to argue that objectivity is their watchword. The issue is not that
journalists are biased or not in their presentation of facts. Rather, it is in
the selection of those who present those facts to us and create a reality for
the audience that this chapter argues about. There is evidence that media often
“justifies their stance on what is “showable” and “sayable” by hinging it on
public sensibilities when in reality it is more of state sensitivities.” (Carruthers,
2000, p. 20).
So when we talk about the
dominant elite, power brokers and Washington muscle, and their hegemonic
strangle hold on every social institution including the mass media, “we do not
refer to a dominant ideology per se, but to practices and relations which
predominate in structuring definitions of social reality.” (Goldman &
Rajagopal,
1991, p. 20). News has been merchandised, and the standardized format of
reporting that calls for heavy dose of Pentagon juice and White House spin
follow the pattern that suits the process of selling news as a commodity. For
the expert sources that were relied upon for stories, reporters invite them to
participate because of the presumed knowledge in the area under discussion.
In looking at the sources
alone, it would be premature to determine whether the stories were slanted or
not. However, if one weighs in on the fact that some sources were relied upon
more than others, it could be safe to say that news balance, one of the tenets
of journalism practice, has been jeopardized based on the heavy reliance on
institutionalized sources for the war in Iraq. Despite the fact that 600
American soldiers were embedded in the military formations, According to Lacy,
Fico, & Simon (1991), “fairness or balance in any given news story is typically
a matter of affording equal coverage of opposing views.”(p. 363).
It could be argued that based
on the skewed reliance of the media on official and military sources most of the
time, bias must have set in to compromise the truth and objectivity credo of the
journalism profession. Bias is defined as “a perceived attribute of a news
source whereby the individual news source, or the group the news source
represents, has a clear vested interest in a cause or action relative to
maintaining or changing the status quo.” (Rouner, Slater & Buddenbaum, 1999, p.
43). Whoever the source may be, reporters can easily hazard a guess the
ideological, political or economic interests of a source. The results here have
shown a discrepancy between the acclaimed journalistic value of presenting
balanced and exhaustive views of issues and the actual process of news gathering
and dissemination.
Overall based on the number of
stories recorded from the Lexis Nexis database comprising stories of the Iraq
war, the first research question about the extent of the coverage is evident.
The story of the war in Iraq has continued to dominate the network news coverage
for the past seventeen or so months since the first indication of impending war
was discerned. In relation to other topical events that happened in the period
since the war in Iraq, the war coverage has dominated.
On the question of which
sources were relied upon by the networks for information about the war, four
distinct groups of sources were identified and their contributions to the news
were determined by the number of times they were consulted or interviewed by the
reporters. The role of sources in shaping the news content cannot be
overemphasized especially the role played by the sources in influencing the
processing of the messages by the audiences. Studies such as those of O’Keefe,
1990, and Chartprasert, 1993, have all studied the role of sources credibility
on message content and impact.
The skewed proportion of
those who had close affiliations with the power brokers, namely official and
military sources, could be indicative of a covert propaganda on the part of the
establishment to ensure that the position of the government receives media
attention as much as possible. Hiebert, 2003 made a reference to a commitment on
the part of the US government to win the war in the mass media as much as the
war at the battle front in Iraq. He also cited Berkowitz’s observation in his
book: “The new face of war: How war will be fought in the 21st
Century” that, “Today the ability to collect, communicate, process and
protect information is the most important factor defining military power.” (p.
244).
Hiebert’s position is that the
war in Iraq had propaganda boldly written all over it, especially the well
managed Pentagon briefings, the “tens of millions of Arabic language leaflets
urging the Iraqis to abandon Saddam or lay down their arms, and loudspeakers
beamed the thunderous recorded sound of British challenger tanks to startle the
Iraqis into surrendering.” (p. 247). Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon
spokespersons personified the hegemonic role of the government as they
chaperoned the media through the fog of the war in Iraq. (embedded) “Journalists
were given some guidance about what they could and could not report, and who
they could and could not talk to. But the general impression left with the
public was that there was no government censorship.” (Hiebert, 2003, p. 250)
Did the role of the embedded
journalist in Iraq help provide convergence or divergence of opinions on the
Iraqi war? Perhaps not, says Hiebert, who said that the action was inimical to a
balanced view of the war since the views that the journalists saw and were
allowed to cover coincided exactly with the objective of the government to make
the war more popular in the face of worldwide criticisms. Since the war news
coverage by the television cable and networks were found to have been favorably
skewed in favor of government and its ideological allies, the totality of the
coverage suffers from a fundamental rule of journalism, that of news balance.
Matz (2003) was an embedded
reporter for one of the newspapers and he remarked that, there were two wars in
Iraq, “the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank
company of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there
was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.” ( Martz, 2003,
p.30). This view was corroborated by another embedded Los Angeles Times
reporter, David Zucchino, who said, “I ate with the troops, I complained with
them about the choking dust, the lack of water, our foul smelling bodies, and
our scaly, rotting feet. I could not interview survivors of Iraqi civilians
killed by US soldiers… I had no idea what ordinary Iraqis were experiencing.” (Periodical
Observer Section, p.97).
The coverage of war has
changed for ever with the new found role for reporters at the frontlines as
embeds, getting real life images from the battle ground and giving new meaning
to war news. As part of that, we have the overriding influence of Hollywood make
believe and the overbearing role of the government propaganda machinery. The
face of war coverage will change for the better, especially from the government
hegemonic position while it will bode ill for the audience who will have to
settle for less than objective and balanced news.
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About the Author
Olugbenga C. Ayeni is Assistant Professor at Eastern
Connecticut State University. Dr. Ayeni teaches mass communication in the
Department of Communication. His research interests include international
communication and conflict and mass media organizations.
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