TV's gloomy take on Iraq

by Brent Bozell (Townhall.com)

Last month, millions of Iraqis walked with determination
to the polls to vote for a new constitution. The turnout
was high. The violence was down dramatically from the
triumphant elections of January. But the network found all
this boring. On the night before the historic vote, ABC led
with bird-flu panic. CBS imagined Karl Rove in a prison
jumpsuit. NBC hyped inflation.

They say that news is a man-bites-dog story. In the Middle
East, how common is a constitutional referendum? Have they
had one in Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Jordan? Until the
last few years, the phrase "Arab constitutional democracy"
sounded like a pipe dream or an oxymoron. But today, the
reporters can only kvetch. NBC's Richard Engel growled
online that the new constitution was "a deeply flawed
document, peppered with religious slogans, and leaves
plenty of room for Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves."
Engel says Iraqis disagree on the constitution, but "with
the daily pressures of the insurgency, power cuts and
lawlessness, there might not be enough time to start over
before this country and the people lose hope -- along with
many of their lives."

Does Engel wear black everywhere he goes? The news pattern
from Iraq has that familiar gloom to it. The process of
building a constitutional democracy has been a story made
in sessions of boring political blather, in a language
Americans can't understand. Bombs blowing people up -- now
that's action, great television, it doesn't require an
interpreter. That's news.

A massive new study by Rich Noyes of the Media Research
Center reviews every Iraq story on the evening news programs
of ABC, CBS and NBC from January through September of 2005.
That's 1,388 news stories. He titled it "The Bad News
Brigade," because 61 percent of the stories were negative
or pessimistic, while only 15 percent of the stories were
positive or optimistic -- a four-to-one ratio. The trend in
coverage has also become increasingly negative during 2005,
with pessimistic stories rising to nearly three-fourths of
all Iraq news by August and September, with a 10-to-one
ratio of negative stories over positive ones.

Terrorists are the real assignment editors of American TV
news from Iraq. Two out of every five network evening news
stories (564 stories this year) featured car bombings,
assassinations, kidnappings or other attacks launched by
the terrorists against the Iraqi people or coalition
forces, more than any other topic. That's an average of
two stories every night between the three shows.
Even the evolution of democracy in Iraq is presented in
more negative than positive terms. More stories (124)
focused on shortcomings in Iraq's political process -- the
danger of bloodshed during the January elections, political
infighting, and fears that the new Iraqi constitution might
spur more violence -- than on the positive side of
democracy-building (92 stories). And then there's this:
One-third of those optimistic stories (32) appeared on just
two nights -- Jan. 30 and 31, just after Iraq's first
successful elections. You can see how people who watch the
news regularly would ask where the good news can be located.

That's especially true when the subject of the story is the
American soldier. In the most upsetting part of the study,
Noyes found that 79 stories focused primarily on allegations
of wrongdoing by American forces in Iraq, including this
year's Abu Ghraib hangover stories, compared to only eight
that focused on the heroism of American soldiers. Is that
still a story? Sure. But what about positive stories about
the military? There were only eight stories that focused on
the heroism of American soldiers, and only nine on soldier
acts of kindness or generosity. The TV news titans not only
suggest the mission in Iraq is a waste of money and lives,
they are painting our soldiers as a big problem there, not
a part of the solution.

The natural rebuttal the media's defenders would offer to
this study came from one defensive blogger at the Washington
Post website: "An objective press is not supposed to
'embrace' anything. It is supposed to report the facts." But
while the news from Iraq can be utterly factual, but in the
selection of facts, be utterly biased. The overwhelming
picture TV viewers get day in and day out, through this
selectivity, is that Iraq is packed with chaos, a "mess."
Viewers should sense a political mission in the gloom.
Demoralization over the "mess" in Iraq drags down Bush's
approval rating, drives the numbers up when the network
pollsters ask constantly whether the war is "worth the
cost," and seems to revise history toward the Howard Dean
view that deposing Saddam Hussein was a colossal mistake.
They are right to assume that when reporters watch the
Iraqis stream to the polls, they see sad puppets of the
American president trying to put a happy-faced Post-It
note on a disaster scene.