Grading TV's War News
Table of Contents:
CBS
CBS’s lowest point came before the war, when anchor Dan Rather traveled to Baghdad for a softball interview with Saddam, asking the man who had killed thousands of his own people, “What are the chances this is the last time you and I will see each other?” But CBS’s war coverage was far superior to ABC, with much less gloomy speculation and a greater emphasis on factually reporting battlefield developments; day after day CBS’s Pentagon reporter David Martin gave the most accurate overview of the war’s progress.
Contrast the way Rather and Jennings began their newscasts on March 24, the fourth day of the war. Opening his Evening News,
Rather was upbeat: “Barreling toward Baghdad. Fast moving U.S. ground
forces fight their way to within miles of the capital. Up above, air
raids try to cut up and cut off Iraqi divisions. Iraq insists Saddam is
alive, well and in control.”
Jennings seemed to be talking about a different war: “On World News Tonight, the U.S. attacks all over Iraq, the drive on Baghdad is cautious. There is opposition and there is weather. The Iraqi leader is alive and on television. Who knows how well he is. The U.S. believes he is still in control. Two more Americans are captured, their helicopter shot down. So many others are coming back full of bullet holes. And the pictures of the POWs. So public now, such pain for the families.” As events unfolded, it became obvious that Rather’s impressions of a successful U.S. drive to Baghdad were more CBS War Coverage accurate than Jennings’s pessimism.
Also on March 24, CBS reported a positive story about how the U.S. was aiding Iraqi civilians. Phil Ittner, embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, showed a U.S. soldier cradling a little girl as his colleagues provided medical aid to her family: “A family of Iraqi civilians, wounded in the conflict, again brought these soldiers streaming out to give what aid they could. This young boy suffered burns and wounds to the face and back. These soldiers say they’re here to take down the leadership in Baghdad which they see as a threat to their families back home. But despite the politics, as they comforted a young Iraqi girl whose family found itself victim of the fighting, nearly all of them said the same thing: that they wish they didn’t have to do it.”
The discrepancies between ABC and CBS continued the next night, March 25, as ABC argued that the U.S. invasion precipitated a water emergency in southern Iraq. In Basra, ABC’s John Donvan dated the loss of water in Basra to “five days” ago, meaning the war caused it, and he outlined the potentially disastrous results: “Day and night, the fighting in Basra has been too intense for aid workers to enter the city. A million people live in Basra, hundreds of thousands of them have been without clean water for five days, the city’s electricity went out last week. The possible consequence: cholera for a start, also diarrhea, which in Iraq often kills young children.”
But over on CBS, Scott Pelley discovered that the water had been “turned off” days before the war started. In Umm Qasr, south of Basra, Pelley asked U.S. Army Major James Thorpe: “Major, why do these people not have water?” Thorpe explained: “Basra, it’s a city just north of us, is normally the location where drinking water comes from for these folks here in Umm Qasr. As it turns out, just before the war started, approximately four or five days before it did, the water that normally flows down here via truck was turned off.”
Pelley asked: “By who?” Thorpe replied: “Well, basically by the ruling party, the Ba’athist party, and I guess, Saddam Hussein.”
CBS did show some of the same second-guessing that tainted ABC’s coverage. On the March 25 48 Hours,
Lesley Stahl challenged the military’s war plan after only five days of
fighting. She asked a Vietnam vet: “You fought in Vietnam. Are you
getting any feelings of deja vu?” Then, in an interview with a former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
Stahl ventured far beyond the limits of her military acumen. (See box.)
Stahl’s glum prognosis notwithstanding, positive developments were generally presented as good news on CBS. On the April 2 CBS Evening News, for example, Rather exulted: “There is major progress and a stunning battlefield victory to report. The U.S. military says two key Republican Guard divisions protecting Baghdad have been beaten so badly they are, quote, ‘no longer credible forces.’ They were pummeled by U.S. forces now closing in on the capital from two sides. To the east, advancing U.S. Marines are now within 30 miles or less of the outskirts of Baghdad. To the west, lead elements of the Army’s third infantry are within 20 miles or less.”
On April 4, after CBS showed videotape of a purported Saddam Hussein walking tour of a Baghdad neighborhood, Pentagon reporter David Martin observed, “Saddam may look confident and in charge, but his military situation is disastrous. Enemy troops at his airport and in his suburbs and his best divisions being chewed up by a ceaseless rain of bombs and artillery shells....With Marines already pressing the attack against another Republican Guard division, there’s every reason to believe it’s only a matter of time before all of Saddam’s divisions are gone.”
Yet that same night on ABC’s World News Tonight, Pentagon reporter John McWethy emphasized a more negative scenario: “As the U.S. begins to really squeeze Baghdad, U.S. intelligence sources are saying that some of Saddam Hussein’s toughest security forces are now apparently digging in, apparently willing to defend their city block by block. This could be, Peter, a long war.” Peter Jennings felt vindicated: “As many people had anticipated.”
