Keeping tabs on tilt of TV war coverage

By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff, 9/10/2003

Is Dan Rather a super patriot and Peter Jennings a near subversive? That would certainly seem to be stretching things. But a new survey -- coupled with other analyses of coverage of the war in Iraq -- suggests that there was a substantive difference in tone between ABC's war-wary "World News Tonight" and the more gung-ho "CBS Evening News."

"The war you saw depended on the network you watched," says S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan media research organization based in Washington that released its evaluation of television war news this week. "We rarely find such a spread of viewpoints across the networks."

The CMPA study, which examined 1,131 stories on the three nightly news broadcasts and Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" from March 19 to April 14, concluded that ABC's coverage was by far the most critical of the war effort. It found that two-thirds of the comments about the war that aired on that newscast were negative, a finding consistent with a survey taken after the 1991 Gulf War. Then, Lichter said, ABC was "the network most critical of the US, the coalition, and Israel." In late April, the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group in Alexandria, Va., released a report card based on viewing extensive war coverage from March 20 through April 9. It gave ABC a D-minus and Jennings an F. And it accused the network of "knee-jerk negativism that played up Iraqi claims of civilian suffering, hyped American military difficulties, and indulged antiwar protesters with free air time."

An ABC spokesman, Jeffrey Schneider, defends the network's coverage.

"We take exception to content analyses which are almost always fraught with serious problems. The only pattern I can detect is good reporting," Schneider says, adding that "many of the themes of our coverage before and during the war . . . have become the central questions in the postwar era," including questions about the reconstruction effort and Iraqi public opinion.

If ABC finds itself parrying charges of too much war skepticism, CBS is in the opposite position. The CMPA survey concluded that CBS's evening-news war coverage "was the most supportive," with 74 percent of all on-air comments favorable to the Bush administration's war effort. Two media watchdogs from different ends of the ideological spectrum bolster that view.

The liberal group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting conducted a survey looking at 1,617 sources on the ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly newscasts, as well as major news programs on CNN, Fox News Channel, and PBS, from March 20 through April 9. It found that Rather's program featured the highest percentage of current or former government employees (75 percent) among its US sources, and the fewest US antiwar voices.

In its evaluation, the Media Research Center gave the Fox News Channel its highest grade (B). CBS finished second with a B-minus; Rather was given a B-plus.

A number of conservative media watchers have accused Rather of liberal bias over the years. But a Media Research Center vice president, Brent Baker, says, "It all depends on the issue. He's always been a guy from Texas . . . always been patriotic. When the war started, Rather's attitude was, `We are at war.' "

At CBS, spokeswoman Sandy Genelius raises questions about the validity of such studies.

"With all due respect, these surveys are always highly subjective," Genelius says. "We believe our coverage of the war was fair and accurate . . . When it comes to covering war, [Dan] is probably the most experienced, most knowledgeable broadcast journalist we have in this country."

The third member of the big three, "NBC Nightly News" with Tom Brokaw, came off as having the most balanced war coverage, according to the CMPA evaluation. It also got a middle-of-the-road C-plus from the Media Research Center. "As a news organization, right down the middle is right where we should be," says NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust.

While these studies tend to back Lichter's view that coverage varied noticeably from network to network, other analysts downplay that idea. FAIR found that across the board, newscasts relied heavily on official US sources and gave short shrift to antiwar voices. "I don't know if there are many mainstream people who think the media gave a real balanced look at the war effort," says FAIR senior analyst Steve Rendall.

Andrew Tyndall, who analzyes the content of the evening newscasts, agrees that there were few dramatic differences on war coverage that was largely driven by the reporters embedded with troops in the region. "Looking for the ideological nuances in the coverage to me is a mistake," he says. "The war was being treated as a technical military story and a human interest story. The question of policy was absent."

Mark Jurkowitz's media column appears on Wednesdays. He can be reached at jurkowitz

@globe.com