The American Media and Wartime Challenges
At 9:34 PM EST on 19 March, 2003 United
States and United Kingdom forces went to war against Iraq. In the twenty-two
day campaign that followed, unprecedented battlefield access was granted to
embedded journalists. This new and controversial policy highlighted the serious
professional responsibility borne by the media.
The conference opened with an attempt
to put key issues into historical perspective. The first speaker challenged
the assumption that the media has the power to affect the outcome of wars.
Daniel Hallin, Professor of Communication at the University of California
at San Diego noted that conventional wisdom has long held that, for better
or worse, the media played a decisive role in turning the public against the
war in Vietnam. In fact, they followed rather than led public opinion, their
views reflecting divisions in the policy-making community and shifts in morale
of American troops. Carol Winkler, Professor of Communications at Georgia
State University examined the ultimatum delivered by President Bush to Saddam
Hussein on 17 March, 2003. She argued
that the speech was written in such a way as to reaffirm the public diplomacy
strategies of Republican Presidents since the Vietnam War. Thomas Lansner
of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs and the School
of Journalism provided the audience with a brief survey of the evolution of
war reporting in the twentieth century.
Some things have changed, most notably technology, which has given
us increasingly smaller, lighter, faster, and more powerful means of communication.
Much, however, remains the same. War
correspondents still report mainly on wars of immediate interest to their
nations and their understanding is obscured by the fog of war. Reporting still
tends to be informed by patriotism and colored by ownership. Finally, everybody
lies in war: anyone who does not accept and understand this is self-deluded.
Continuing this theme,
the next three speakers embarked on a lively discussion of the problems of “finding and telling the truth.” Cori
Dauber, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, argued that the prestige media - the Washington
Post, the New York Times and the three network nightly news channels
- have a liberal bias, especially
visible in the way they frame issues. Military coverage, in particular, tends
to be anti-war. She ended with an impassioned plea. Stories of heroism in
combat are no more fraudulent than any others and should be aired. Our second speaker, Joseph Neff, a reporter
from the Raleigh News and Observer analyzed the difficulties facing
those covering war and military affairs. Newspapers are imperfect institutions, publishing on the fly, with
imperfect information, imperfectly cited. Sometimes reporters are thwarted
because others deny them access. At
other times, they themselves miss meaningful stories, neglecting, for example,
news about the poor equipment of “ground-pounders” and reporting instead on
dazzling new technologies. Robert Lichter, President of the Center
for Media and Public Affairs, an organization which does content analysis
studies of media coverage, stressed that determining bias is difficult. Analysts
must cope with a plethora of information and coding difficulties. Determining
the line between bias and a fair-minded effort to offer a “different” perspective
is not easy. It is a lot harder to “think” than to “feel” about bias in the media, hence the importance of amassing
hard evidence.
Inadequate coverage of national security issues is
a serious concern, often linked to
economics. The third panel addressed this problem. James Hamilton,
Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Duke University analyzed the market
for war coverage. What really gets
produced, he said, answers five economic questions: Who cares about a particular
piece of information? What are consumers willing to pay to find information
or are others willing to pay to reach those people? Where can media outlets or advertisers reach
people? When is it profitable to provide
information, and why is it profitable? Lawrence
Grossman, former President of NBC News, conceded that war reporting can
be expensive though the biggest cost comes from declining advertising revenues.
The media cannot tastefully position their perky, chirpy, frivolous commercials
next to tough-to-take war footage. At the same time, he noted, war provides
substantial economic offsets and rewards for news organizations. News is basically
about bad things that happen to people. Thus war builds news audiences and
raises the circulation of newspapers and news magazines. Scott Deatherage,
a noted debate-coach at Northwestern University, observed that journalists,
broadcasters and media decision-makers follow a time-honored and time-failed
soft-news format. Though they do so to hold on to shrinking audiences and
to satisfy advertisers, public opinion data suggests that news consumers are
interested in hard news coverage of the pressing issues of our time. Even
were this not true, however, the media have a responsibility to provide consistent,
quality coverage in a time of war. We depend upon them to give us a reliable
version of emerging national security events.
The fourth panel developed the concerns discussed
by Mr. Deatherage, addressing head on the issue of media influence on public
opinion and the impact of public opinion on foreign policy. Paul Pillar,
a National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, stressed
the need for the media to be a partner in the struggle against terrorism.
The media should remember that sympathy and support for terrorists is directly
tied to the attitudes, the perceptions, and the outlooks of foreign publics.
On the domestic front, the media must help sustain interest in the counterterrorism
effort and help the public better understand the nature of a complex threat.
Robert Entman, Communication, North Carolina State University, argued
in favor of developing a more complex model to explain the interaction of
the media, the public, and the government. He noted that, in today’s complicated
international environment, the media is neither entirely watchdog nor entirely
lapdog of the White House. Public opinion is the captive of the media only
when coverage is entirely one-sided and this happens relatively rarely. Moreover,
in times of crisis, one-sided coverage may be desired (for ebber or for worse)
as much as by the public as by the White House. The last speaker on the panel
reminded us that we must always consider public skills and attitudes. Ellen Mickiewicz, De Witt Wallace Center
for Communication and Journalism, Duke University, showed that surprisingly,
and a bit disconcertingly, the Russian public appears to be able to make reasonably
solid political decisions, despite being presented with limited and biased
information.
The fifth panel explored
the relationship between the military and the media. James Der Derian,
International Relations, Amherst, argued that the modern media has a unique,
almost incestuous relationship with the military. The military relies increasingly
on the media to win the hearts and minds of domestic and sometimes foreign
publics. The speed of our communication networks has given our military improved
ability to command, control, and conduct surveillance. Media technology, moreover,
has enabled the military to train for war using simulations and war-games.
This has increased our efficiency but at the same time it has blurred the
lines between game and reality, and hidden from us the human cost of war.
It has confirmed us in our belief that we are fighting “Virtuous Wars” – both
clean and righteous – and this in turn has led to an increased willingness
on our part to resort to the use of force. Cori Dauber focused on the
damage done by ignorance. There are relatively few reporters outside the Press
Corps who have studied war or had military experience. As a result, in times
of war, media outlets have no surge capacity. The lessons that many journalists
bring away from Journalism School is that 1) the Pentagon can do no right
and 2) the troops can do no wrong. When this is combined with lax standards,
the media can do real damage. In reporting on civilian casualties in Afghanistan,
for example, leading dailies cited, without checking, wildly exaggerated figures
supplied by a New Hampshire Professor – very adversely affecting public perception
of the American war effort. General Robert W. Bazley, USAF (Ret) who
graciously stepped in to replace General
Bernard Trainor, agreed that the lack of experience and training of reporters
had been a source of worry to him during his years as an operational commander.
He added that the policy of embedding seemed to him to be a very constructive
one. It would doubtless offer great learning opportunities to the journalists.
The final panel focused
on the problem of how to balance freedom of the press with national security
interests. Mohammed el-Nawawy, Assistant Professor of Communication
at Stonehill College and former reporter for the Associated Press in
Cairo, provided a thought-provoking look at the dilemmas posed by Al-Jazeera.
He conceded that the network is widely viewed by Americans as a source of “propaganda.” He argued, however, that it is creating “liberty” in the Arab
world by sparking public debate. American officials should use it because
it is trusted by Arabs. They should, however, pay more attention to their
audience. Arabs, for example, are convinced not by detachment (which they
see as deception) but by eloquence. Like el-Nawawy, Judith Miller,
former General Counsel to the Department of Defense, emphasized the value
of our basic freedoms. Security in wartime is important but controlling the
media and restricting public access to websites and information may be counterproductive.
It hamstrings us as well as our enemy and may thus not only undermine our
rights but reduce our security. The conference ended with a broad look at
how the changing information environment may affect the military, the media,
and our democratic society. Jorge Reina Schement, Department of Telecommuncations,
Penn State University, noted that private homes have increasingly gone from
being castles to being nodes on networks. Because there is so much information
and because people are picking and choosing in rather random ways what to
look at, there is a radical decline in commonly experienced information and
commonly mediated messages. Increasingly we cannot predict how Americans use
information and how they react to it. This is going to make the challenge
for the media in wartime all the greater in the future.