MediaWatch: February 1991
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: February 1991
- Patriots Prove Media Myopia
- NewsBites: Kudos for Quayle
- Revolving Door: War Talkers
- More Concerned About Selves Than Soldiers
- Jennings Just As Wrong
- Legitimizing Propaganda
- Janet Cooke Award: ABC: Sanitized Protest
Janet Cooke Award: ABC: Sanitized Protest
Critics of Gulf War press restrictions have complained that the Pentagon is "sanitizing" the war effort. But here at home, the media are sanitizing the anti-war effort. Reporters have insisted that the entire protest movement is a mainstream coalition which supports the troops and opposes Saddam Hussein. For leading the way in lionizing the protest movement, ABC reporter Jackie Judd earned the February Janet Cooke Award.
On Nightline January 18, the evening before the first Washington protest against the war, Judd gave an overview: "The message of this movement is a simpler one than that of twenty-five years ago, when American soldiers were vilified and Ho Chi Minh was sometimes cheered. Today, no one is blaming the war on the warriors. Saddam Hussein is recognized as a menace. And the hope of today's opponents is that their message will have broader and broader appeal."
But in The Washington Post the morning of the protest, reporter Paul Valentine quoted Sahu Barron, a "founding organizer" of the rally's sponsor, the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East. Barron, a prominent local member of the Trotskyite Workers World Party, "said the idea of Saddam Hussein as a 'bad guy' or a 'mad man' is 'comic book politics.'" Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan quoted coalition member Star Curliss on January 20: "I see Saddam Hussein as a man doing what he needs to do."
In the January 29 Village Voice, Sarah Ferguson reported on the January 19 protest: "The speakers' podium was dominated for the most part by Third World internationalists, Palestinians, and old-line leftists who soundly trashed American imperialism abroad. Most of the speakers did not denounce Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait." Ferguson also mentioned a banner reading "Defend Iraq: Defeat U.S. Imperialism."
Even the January 26 protest in Washington, described as more mainstream, was populated with many of the same people. A Washington Post survey taken at that protest found that 65 percent of the protesters had marched in a previous Persian Gulf protest, and that 91 percent had marched in other protests before. In Washington's alternative City Paper of February 1, Alex Heard wrote: "'We need to remember this is not a war about oil,' one woman said. 'It's a war about the U.S. trying to re-establish the might of U.S. imperialism against the Third World peoples of Iraq. We need to proclaim victory for the people of Iraq!' A large part of the crowd cheered that heartily."
Of course, the protest movement is a diverse lot: a large number (56 percent, according to the Post poll) were pacifists who claimed to oppose all war; some objected to the war's diversion of funds from domestic spending; some questioned fighting for feudal kingdoms. But the large January 19 protest was not simply attended by members of the Workers World Party, it was organized by them. On December 27, Reuters reported that the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East was "affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party." Interestingly, Judd only aired organizers from the "more moderate" Committee for Peace in the Mideast, even though their protest was eight days off.
This was not the first time Judd promoted the protest movement. On Nightline last October 19, Judd proclaimed: "It would be easy to dismiss opponents of the buildup as oddball fringe elements. It's happened before. One bitter lesson of the Vietnam War is nobody paid attention to the critics until many thousands of lives had been lost. Today's dissenters say they don't hope history repeats itself."
Among the "oddball fringe elements" that have been a regular fixture of anti-war protests are Trotskyite groups such as the Spartacist League, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Workers World Party, not to mention the Revolutionary Communist Party, those fun-loving Maoists who went to the Supreme Court for the right to burn the flag.
Judd repeatedly aimed to separate these protesters from the Vietnam protesters: "Unlike the '60s, this fledgling movement is not confined to the young and the alienated. Though a definite minority, it is more a cross-section of America." But the Post poll found that 40 percent of the marchers identified themselves as "liberal" and 41 percent called themselves "very liberal." Just two percent described themselves as "conservative." That's hardly a cross-section of America.
Judd also suggested that "Almost every major Christian denomination is on record as opposing the war." The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant denomination in the country, has not opposed the war. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod issued a statement in support of the President: "We are witnessing an act of aggression that must be corrected."
Officials at the U.S. Catholic Conference told MediaWatch the concept of the Catholic Church being "on record" against the war is "too blanket a statement." Some major church officials have spoken out in support of American action. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston said peace "is not fulfilled at the price of granting tyrants and aggressors an open field to achieve unjust ends."
Judd's story included no critics of the protesters. After Judd, Ted Koppel interviewed George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, but the interview was cut short for a war update and never resumed. Judd told MediaWatch the interview balanced the show as a whole. "I don't feel like I have to defend myself against this piece. I stand by it."
About the Workers World Party and other radical parties, Judd said her story focused on "the makeup of the movement: who is involved, their motivations, their intentions," but "There are probably also some members of this movement who are members of the Republican Party, and I didn't mention that either....I think most reporters would tend to talk about who is part of the mainstream of the movement. I think the judgments of people in the movement and the judgments of outsiders looking in are probably that the majority are not Trotskyites." Right, but they were the organizers of one of the big protests. Judd later added: "You go to the people who are most important to the movement, who are sort of the largest building blocks of it...I included the people who I thought were important to this and representative of it."
It is certainly not the media's job to denigrate the protesters or make them appear unattractive, but it is the media's job to report on all the important factions of the protest movement, not just the attractive or "mainstream" ones. Excluding the views of a large number of organizers and speakers at the protests was nothing less than dishonest. If a conservative demonstration included David Duke supporters, racist skinheads or any other unattractive extremists, would ABC's story ignore them because they were not "representative"?
