MEDIA BLOG - THE LACK OF OBJECTIVITY IN THE NEWS

Reporting on the search for weapons in Iraq

Recently, I have begun to pay closer attention to news articles from the Washington Post. In my opinion, it seems like the Washington Post is being more objective than other news organizations in its reporting of the war in Iraq. An example can be found in today's article entitled Hunt for Iraqi Arms Erodes Assumptions. The article discusses recent attempts at finding banned weapons in Iraq. The article quotes anonymous miltary sources that suggest that they are becoming more and more doubtful about the likelihood of finding anything. The articles describes a "five-tiered list" that the military is using in its search, and that all of the top tier sites searched so far have turned up negative. The article even quotes an unnamed military official as saying "the clues we have right now are not leading us anywhere". The article does a good job of bring the weapons search into context, reminding readers of how it began: "Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." You may be asking yourself, where is the lack of objectivity that I am supposed to be talking about? For the answer, visit CNN.com. Scan the headlines, go to the World News section -- even visit the Middle East News section. You won't find an article remotely similar. Not even one that mentions the "five-tier" approach that the military is using in its search efforts. No references to the same or similar quotes from the U.S. Military. Why isn't CNN covering this story? The only recent article that pertains to the results of the ongoing weapons search relates to the recent interview of an Iraqi scientist. The military says that the scientist claims that the Iraqis destroyed weapons on the eve of the U.S. invasion. However, the military did not allow a New York Times reporter to interview the scientist. Even so, CNN reports the claims as fact, using the headline "Report: Iraq destroyed chemical weapons just before war". Of course, the counter-argument here is that the use of the prefix "Report:" indicates that CNN is merely relating what someone else has said. Bullshit! If some guy walks up to me on the street and tells me that an asteroid is headed for earth, is it okay for me to publish a headline "Report: Asteroid Headed for Earth"? Of course not. The headline is clearly misleading, and many people will actually take it as fact. Perhaps that was the intent....

Over the weekend, I went to see the movie Bowling for Columbine, the Oscar-winning documentary by Michael Moore. I knew that the film discussed gun violence in the United States, but I was not expecting the analysis of the effect that the Media has on the issue. Moore highlights the fact that although gun crimes have gone down in recent years, media coverage of such crimes has gone up almost exponentially. The result: people are scared - really scared. And scared people go out and buy more guns, for protection. I could go on and on for pages about this cultivation of a "culture of fear" in America, but instead I will comment only on the implications for media coverage. In my previous post, I talked about objective reporting as it relates to telling both (or all) sides of the story, in an unbiased manner. After watching the film, it really made me think about media objectivity from a different angle: the objectivity of deciding which stories to tell, and which not to tell. For that matter, what stories go on the front page, and what stories go on page 15? Who in the media decides what is most important for people, and how do they make that determination? That is a lot of power, as the media has a huge impact on how the public perceives their community, the nation, and the world. In communist or dictatorship regimes, this is well understood -- in order to maintain control, it is very important to control the media. But in a democratic society, that power passes to the media organizations. How do they decide what is important? How do they decide what stories not to cover? What happens when the media becomes biased in some way, individually, or collectively? How different is that from the dictator who is at the helm? Are the people still free? Freedom is a matter of perspective.