Lacey Klein
Fall 2006
CORCOM 130
Bias in the Media: “War on Terror”
As the “War on Terror” continues to be the main focus of American politics and American political debate, differing opinions on the level of honesty of the current administration’s reason for going to war in the first place fly from the left, to the center, to the right, and around again. With the president and his advisors seemingly set in their ways, some of the only representation that the American people have left is through the media. Whether they claim to be unbiased or not, these news channels, newspapers, radio stations, and online sites all have slightly different political undercurrents to their reporting that can tell someone a lot about the true feelings of the authors, and even the corporations themselves. In this paper, I will research the biases between two newspapers; The Washington Post and Newsweek. I will try and decipher which way their articles lean politically, find out who’s opinions are being represented in the specific articles, and also report on whether or not my findings are in agreement with others who have tried to answer these same questions. To detect these biases I will try to answer critical questions regarding the articles that I am focusing on.
No matter how many times we try to deny that every form of human communication is always given in the context of the giver, we will always be proven wrong. Whether it is from a third grader talking to the class for the first time about what his/her parents do for a living, or a professional journalist speaking on behalf of a top ten news corporation, there will always be their history, whether political, economic, or historical, to consciously or unconsciously bias what is being said. To try and deter such bias, there is a set journalistic ethical code, in which objectivity and fairness are strong influences. “But journalistic objectivity is not the pristine objectivity of philosophy. Instead, a journalist attempts to be objective by two methods: 1) fairness to those concerned with the news and 2) a professional process of information gathering that seeks fairness, completeness, and accuracy” (Rhetorica 1). Whether or not these ethical requirements are always reached is another story.
It is possible to find evidence to “prove” biases in the media towards liberals as well as conservatives. However, before I attempt to do this, I will discuss more inherent structural biases of journalism, which explain more about why journalists present things in and why.
The first form of structural bias that I will discuss is commercial bias. Since the news media are for-profit corporations, they “must deliver a good product to their consumers to make a profit. The customers of the news media are advertisers, and the most important product the news media delivers to its customers are readers or viewers” (2).
The second type of structural bias is temporal bias. “The news media are biased toward the immediate. News is what’s new and fresh. To be immediate and fresh, the news must be ever-changing even when there is little news to cover” (2).
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Visual bias is when newspapers and television are biased toward visual depictions of news. “Television is nothing without picture. Legitimate news that has no visual angle is likely to get little attention. Much of what is important in politics—policy—cannot be photographed” (2).
One for of bias that should be familiar to anyone who watches their local or nightly news is bad news bias. “Good news is boring. This bias makes the world look like a more dangerous place than it really is. Plus, the bias makes politicians look far more crooked than they really are” (2).
The fifth type is the status quo bias. An example of this was the Florida voting fiasco. The mainstream media never questioned the structure of the American political system, and constantly maintained that the American way is the only way and that is always works. “This bias ensures that alternate points of view about how government might run and what government might do are effectively ignored” (3).
The structural bias that is probably the most recognized and debated is the narrative bias. Most of the news is reported in a way that reads like a good story. There is always a clear beginning, middle, and end, and show viewers or readers a cause and effect relationship. “Good storytelling requires drama, and so this bias often leads journalists to add, or seek out, drama for the sake of drama. Controversy creates drama. Journalists often seek out the opinions of competing experts of officials in order to present conflict between two sides of an issue (2).
Ethical journalistic rules require that reporters and editors be fair. However this does not always occur, creating the fairness bias. “Whenever one faction or politician does something or says something newsworthy, the press is compelled by this bias to get a reaction from an opposing camp. This created the illusion that the game of politics is always contentious and never cooperative. This bias can also create situations in which one faction appears to be attacked by the press” (3).
The expediency bias explains why there are so many poorly researched and incomplete reports. For example, competition over who can cover the story first, who can give you an interview the fastest, who will be ready with a quote, and so on. Most of the people who fulfill these requirements are not always the most accurate sources, they simply get the job done.
Finally, there is the glory bias. This bias “shows itself in particularly obnoxious ways in television journalism. News promos with stirring music and heroic pictures of individual reporters create an aura of omnipresence and omnipotence” (3). The satellite phone is one instrument that can be ascribed to this bias. “Note how often it’s used in situations in which a normal video feed should be no problem to establish, e.g. a report from Tokyo I saw recently on CNN. The jerky pictures and fuzzy sound of satellite phone create a romantic image of foreign adventure” (3).
Now that I have described numerous inherent structural biases that exist in the media, I will apply them to two specific articles surrounding the “War on Terror.” The first article that I will analyze is from the Washington Post, entitled “A Good Leak.” Although newspaper editorial pages are entitled to their own opinions, they cross the line when they begin to come up with their own facts. “A Good Leak” was about revelations in the investigation of the leaking of undercover CIA analyst’s Valerie
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Plame Wilson’s name by administration sources. This occurred after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged a key White House argument for war- that Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa. The paper’s April 9 article supported Bush’s actions. However, the position taken was backed up with an inaccurate claim:
“The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established,
as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson
was the one guilty twisting the truth. In fact, his report
supported the conclusion that Iraq has sought uranium”
(Washington Post).
“The actual National Intelligence Estimate did not support the White House’s claims about uranium, nor did Wilson’s report.” From the NIE report, the Post reported that the uranium allegations were treated skeptically.
“Unknown to the reporters, the uranium claim lay deeper
inside the estimate, where it said a fresh supply of uranium
ore would ‘shorten the time Baghdad needs to produce
nuclear weapons.’ But it also said U.S. intelligence did
not know the status of Iraq’s procurement efforts, ‘cannot
confirm’ any success and had inconclusive evidence about
Iraq’s domestic uranium operations” (Washington Post).
The Post also added that the Senate, as well as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, has reservations about the uranium claims. Eventually, the Senate report found “that State Department analysts concluded that Wilson’s information supported their view that there wasn’t much substance to the Iraq-Niger link” (FAIR 2). If this is true, that why is the Washington Post is still arguing that the White House had a strong case against Wilson—“especially on a claim that the White House had long admitted was incorrect?” (3).
The disconnect between what the Bush administration was alleging and the official NIE document has been accepted and written about by other papers, including Newsweek. In October 2005, Newsweek began an article covering the same story in a very different way than that of the Washington Post editorial. They were quick and to the point with their opinion of the same story. It can almost be said that they leaned the exact opposite way of the Washington Post editorial. On October 19, 2005, Newsweek published an article very different from the Washington Post.
NEWSWEEK: “The lengthy account by New York Times
reporter Judy Miller about her grand jury testimony in the
CIA leak case inadvertently provides a revealing window
into how the Bush administration manipulated journalists
about intelligence on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass
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destruction. Whatever the implications for special prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe, Miller describes a conversation
with Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter)
Libby, on July 8, 2003, where he appears to significantly
misrepresent the contents of still-classified material from a
crucial prewar intelligence-community document about Iraq.
With no weapons of mass destruction having been found in
Iraq and new questions being raised about the case for war,
Libby assured Miller that day that the still-classified document,
a National Intelligence Estimate(NIE), contained even stronger
evidence that would support the White House’s conclusions
about Iraq’s weapons programs, according to Miller’s account.
In fact, a declassified version of the NIE was publicly released
just 10 days later, and it showed almost precisely the opposite.
The NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that
had never been publicly acknowledged by the administration
prior to the invasion of Iraq. It also included key dissents by
the State Department intelligence analysts, Energy Department
scientists and Air Force technical experts about some important
aspects of the administration’s case” (Newsweek.com).
This article from the Washington Post is a perfect example of bias in the media for a number of reasons. First, all sides were not represented equally in either article. In the Washington Post article, the president and his administration are represented, but CIA agents Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, were not. The different levels of power at play in the editorial are clear through the scare-tactics that the Bush administration has the power to use as a means of control, such as leaking names of CIA agents, which could endanger their lives. There are also few different organizations that are represented in this article. Information is taken from speeches given by the Bush administration, and reports by the National Intelligence Estimate, and the Senate Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, the majority of the credibility is given to the Bush administration. Although the Iraq-uranium story is covered, what is not mentioned is how the government betrayed the secret identities of its own employees, whom are kept secret to protect their lives, simply because it was angry that they were questioning whether or not what was being told was the truth, and asking if the government was telling lies to support a war that they wanted to happen. What is also ignored are the implications that the government is trying to get us to go to war under false circumstances. Conversely, in the Newsweek article, more credit is given to the CIA agents and the NIE report than to the Bush administration. It is clear that Newsweek is not trying to stand up for the administration, and is in fact placing as mush blame as possible on them. It seems as though the higher up on the totem pole one is, the more distrust the writer has. They give a huge amount of credit to the NIE report, much more that the Washington Post does. In fact, the majority of the credibility in the Newsweek article is give to the NIE report. However, in both articles, little to no
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attention was given to the fact that two CIA agent’s names had been released by the same government that they were working for, possibly endangering their lives and the lives of their families. The political coverage in these two articles focused only on how issues affect politicians and executives, rather than the people directly affected.
Another disturbing fact that I found is the lack of race and gender diversity represented among these news outlets. In a 40 month nightly news survey done by FAIR, it was found that viewers consisted of “…92 percent white and 89 percent male. A similar survey of PBS’s NewsHour found its guest list was 90 percent male” (FAIR 1). If readers of newspaper even come close to the lack of diversity found in nightly news programs, then they are in trouble. Also, in parts of the articles, it seemed like they were holding the government to one standard of 100 percent honesty, while using a different standard for themselves. Either way, the stereotype of the government always trying to hide something or as being dishonest could have contributed to the skewing of their image to the public.
It is my opinion that the Washington Post article leans to the right politically, and the Newsweek article leans to the left, although I am sure there are many people that disagree and think the exact opposite. Although biases in mainstream news can be found every day, it is a rarity when a reporter openly acknowledges it. In an article for the Washington Post, political writer Dana Milbank wrote an article entitled “My Bias for Mainstream News.” In her article, Milbanks excellently sums up the problems with trying to place labels on journalists, and makes me realize that one can never please everyone. If one has chosen the career of a political writer, the should know long before that no matter how careful they are, most of the time they just can’t win. However, there is a big difference between never pleasing everyone, and not being forthright in one’s reporting. For my conclusion, I will let you read Milbank’s article, which basically sums up my findings in my quest to uncover political bias in the mainstream media.