Academics have expressed concern over coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq in numerous ways: from discussing the conflict in their classes to joining protests and taking out full-page advertisements in national publications such as the New York Times.
Daniel Brumberg, a professor in the government department at Georgetown University, presented a study of Arab public opinion to a U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee in October 2002 detailing the effects an American-led war on Iraq might have.
Brumberg said the flood of images on media networks Wednesday showing Iraqis rejoicing over the fall of Baghdad might have been partially motivated by the demands of news networks’ audiences.
“It’s probably that television media wants to display happy images of liberation because they have an audience who wants to see those sorts of things and to some extent they pander to that,” Brumberg said. “It all depends on who you’re looking at.”
Brumberg said that media representation of the war would have an impact on public opinion in the United States and in the Arab world.
While networks show Iraqis joyous over the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, Brumberg said it was important to remember that even those in Iraq who are happy about U.S. forces arriving are still living in a war-torn nation.
“There are thousands of Iraqi mothers who have lost sons. Every one of the killed Iraqi soldiers had extensive, traditional families that may include over a hundred people,” Brumberg said. “That’s half-a-million or more very unhappy family members.”
Bush administration officials are walking through what Brumberg called a “political minefield” by trying to keep public opinion in Middle Eastern nations from swaying too far against the United States. With many different Iraqi groups anxious to see what system of governance will replace Hussein’s dictatorship, Brumberg said it was important that the United States did not appear to favor one over the other — for example, the Shi’ites over the Kurds.
U.S. news networks repeatedly showed Iraqi citizens and U.S. Marines cooperating to tear down a statute of Hussein in the streets of Baghdad. Before the effigy was hitched to a military vehicle and pulled down, a U.S. Marine wrapped the statute’s head in an American flag.
“This was a disaster to the extent they put an American flag over the face of Saddam, and while it was understandably done in the exuberance of the moment, the U.S. doesn’t not want to send the message they acting as conquerors,” Brumberg said.
Denise St. Clair is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin and a founding member of Analyzing Media Perspectives, a media watchdog group comprised of UW students.
Media Perspectives has examined 787 newspaper stories from 19 newspapers in 14 countries since Sept. 13, 2002, the day President Bush asked the United Nations General Assembly for actions against Iraq. The group found that only 6 percent of sources in U.S. newspaper stories were from non-governmental sources. Outside of the United States and the United Kingdom, international newspaper sources feature 13 percent outside of government officials.
St. Clair said that, of late, most U.S. media sources report stories that detail the military’s progression in the war, while many Arab and international newspapers report the effect the war has had on civilians in the Middle East. Media Perspectives’ main concern has been the one-sidedness of sources for news stories around the world.
“In stories that are being reported from the U.S., there is more of a reliance on official sources and more specifically U.S. official sources,” St. Clair said. “That means media consumers are getting Rumsfeld; they’re getting President Bush; they’re getting John Ashcroft and Ari Fliescher.”
St. Clair said her group and others have made the argument that the U.S. must be careful of the phenomenon of “radicalizing the moderate,” in which public opinion shifts because of perceptions developed from media representation. In particular, people in places like Egypt support Hussein’s regime, not because they agree with his regime’s actions in the slightest, but because they view the U.S.-led war as an attempt to stifle their area and lifestyles.
“It must be very difficult for the U.S. troops in particular, because they are told they need to capture a city but also not appear to be completely taking it over, because you’re eventually giving it back to the people,” St. Clair said.
St. Clair gave the example of CNN using the phrase “coalition forces” and the Al-Jazeera network employing the word “invaders” to describe the advancing army.
“From [Media Perspectives’] perspective, it’s important for the average media consumer to be critical of the stories they read and to consider the sources used,” St. Clair said. “I don’t believe in liberal media bias; I don’t believe in conservative media bias. We need to be critical because there’s a lack of sources in the media.”
