While
the broadcast networks have generally empathized with the distress of
airline passengers over the TSA's new and intrusive airport searches,
they have not - thus far, at least - gone so far as to impugn the Obama
administration as launching a war against Americans' civil liberties.
Indeed, NBC's Matt Lauer on Monday even sympathized [1]
with TSA Administrator John Pistole: "I hate to even think of what
happens if the government caves in on this, and relaxes these
procedures, and someone manages to get something on board a plane and
causes harm. Imagine the questions you'll be asked at that point."
But that's not the approach those networks took when it was the Bush
administration taking steps to protect citizens against potential
attack. Instead, as a 2006 analysis by the Media Research Center [2]
documented, the networks firmly aligned themselves with those who saw
the Patriot Act and the electronic surveillance of international phone
calls as a dire threat to civil liberties.
While some on the Left claimed the media were enthusiastic boosters of
the Bush administration in the days after 9/11, our analysts found
network reporters began to question the idea of a vigorous War on Terror
within days of the attacks. During live coverage on September 13, 2001,
ABC's late Peter Jennings suggested the United States might no longer
be a free country. "Much of the evidence now being obtained in this
investigation is being obtained under something called the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is pretty much equivalent, I think
some people believe, to martial law," Jennings told former Clinton
Justice Department official Eric Holder.
"As a result," Jennings wondered, "do you believe that civil liberties have effectively been suspended in the country?"
For
the next five years, network reporters would return to the "endangered
civil liberties" topic in a majority of their stories about the Patriot
Act (56 out of 91 stories, or 62%). The networks presented fears about a
police state as valid and reasonable, perhaps even an admirable early
warning. On the July 4, 2003 CBS Evening News, fill-in anchor John
Roberts claimed that "as Americans celebrate their independence today,
concern is growing that civil liberties are threatened as never before
by the Patriot Act." The following story by reporter Lee Cowan touted
"an unlikely revolutionary, soft-spoken librarian Marilyn Sotirelis."
Ms. Sotirelis was celebrated for "quietly leading a charge against the
U.S. Justice Department." Rather than cooperate with a possible request
from the FBI for records pertaining to a valid terrorism investigation,
Cowan saluted how some libraries were taking "drastic measures,
shredding all their check-out records." He fawningly asked Sotirelis,
"Do you feel like you're on the front lines of defending democracy?" She
replied, "In a way, yes. But librarians always are."
Out of 91 stories on the Patriot Act, only five noted that there have
been no violations of civil liberties in the years since the law was
enacted. Citing a Justice Department memo on the September 18, 2003
World News Tonight, Peter Jennings revealed that "the FBI has never used
a provision of the law which gives it more power to obtain business
records, including credit card statements and even library records, in
terrorism investigations." So much for the "revolutionary" librarian
"leading a charge" against the FBI.
And only NBC's Pete Williams on September 10, 2003, told viewers that
some of the supposedly controversial elements of the Patriot Act -
including the provision for "delayed notification," where a warrant can
be executed to search a home or business and the subject only told about
it after the fact - were already legally-approved techniques for
anti-drug and mob cases prior to the Patriot Act becoming law.
All of the networks favored experts, mostly lawyers or law professors,
who disapproved of the Patriot Act. Of 23 soundbites from experts, 61
percent faulted the law as a threat to privacy rights. Of the 19
ordinary citizens who made it onto the network evening newscasts, all of
them were critics like the librarian cited above, even though the
networks' own polls showed that the public largely approved of the
Patriot Act.
In
2005, all three broadcast networks jumped on revelations in the New
York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been monitoring
suspicious phone calls and e-mails to and from the United States. That
first night, December 16, 2005, ABC's World News Tonight began their
broadcast with the words "Big Brother" beside a picture of President
Bush; anchor Bob Woodruff teased, "Big Brother, the uproar over a secret
presidential order giving the government unprecedented powers to spy on
Americans."
CBS anchor Bob Schieffer began the Evening News by presenting the
President as tilting toward criminality: "It is against the law to
wiretap or eavesdrop on the conversations of Americans in this country
without a warrant from a judge, but the New York Times says that is
exactly what the President secretly ordered the National Security Agency
to do in the months after 9/11."
The NSA program that the Times disclosed is aimed at uncovering plots
similar to 9/11, where terrorist operatives were present in the United
States weeks and months before the actual attack. The program only
focused on calls in which one party was outside the U.S. As General
Michael Hayden, director of the NSA when the program began, explained at
a January 23, 2006 National Press Club speech: "This is hot pursuit of
communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe
is associated with al-Qaeda."
The networks were far less interested in the program's value to
disrupting potential terror plots than stressing the hypothetical
dangers to Americans' privacy. Most stories stressed topics that
troubled liberals: the potential for violating Americans' civil
liberties (64 stories, or 50% of the total) and questions about whether
the President had exceeded his constitutional powers (38, or 30%).
Relatively few stories (21, or 16%) discussed the value of the
surveillance program in the overall War on Terror.
Network coverage, particularly during the first few days, portrayed the
NSA revelations as a Bush administration scandal. In the seven days
after the New York Times revealed its existence, the three networks ran a
combined 23 stories about the NSA program, more than one story per
night. Reporters portrayed the program as evidence of transgression, not
an effort at protection. "Tonight, President Bush [is]...under fire for
authorizing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans," CBS's
John Roberts claimed on the December 18, 2005 Evening News.
"The revelations about spying have overshadowed the President's recent
efforts to explain his Iraq strategy," ABC's Martha Raddatz asserted on
the December 19, 2005 World News Tonight, leaving aside the fact that it
was the media who opted to focus on the NSA program and thus
"overshadow" the other news. "You can expect the White House to continue
to try and get the message out about Iraq," Raddatz told anchor
Elizabeth Vargas, "but this spying story is not going away."
Most (59%) of the networks' NSA stories cast the program as either
legally dubious or outright illegal. On the December 19, 2005 World News
Tonight, ABC's Pierre Thomas cast the President as acting unlawfully:
"The Constitution grants the President the powers of Commander-in-Chief,
but scholars argue it says nothing about unbridled presidential power
to eavesdrop."
While the networks presented the actual NSA program as of dubious
legality, they had almost nothing to say about the legality of the leaks
to the New York Times and USA Today that exposed the classified
information. Just five network stories (4%) focused on the potential
illegality of the leaks to the media, or the decisions of the two
newspapers to publish government secrets.
Indeed, when network reporters mentioned the leak investigations, they
portrayed it as part of an attack on the news media. "A federal probe of
a New York Times report threatens to further chill the President's
relationship with the news media," CBS's Joie Chen argued on the
December 31, 2005 Evening News.
Apparently, the possible illegality of divulging government secrets to
the New York Times did not trouble network reporters. But those same
journalists seem to regard the government's monitoring of overseas phone
calls involving potentially dangerous terrorists as a great threat to
the public - greater, presumably, than the danger posed by damaging the
government's anti-terrorism efforts by disclosing them to the world.
- Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here [3].