Grading TV's War News
Table of Contents:
NBC/MSNBC
Many of the same war correspondents were featured on both NBC and MSNBC during the course of the war, so their reporting will be analyzed together. Generally, NBC and MSNBC offered solid, factual coverage, especially from their strong team of embedded reporters. (See the embedded reporters section.) MSNBC emphasized its patriotism with devices such as “America’s Wall” — a billboard of photographs of military personnel fighting in the war, sent to the network by their friends and families. Both networks’ grades were marred by their use of National Geographic Explorer’s Peter Arnett as a Baghdad reporter, which will be discussed in the “Baghdad reporters” section of this report.
MSNBC got off to a rocky start, as anchor Brian Williams — who
sometimes generated long-winded and convoluted interview questions —
erroneously likened the pinpoint bombing of individual government
buildings in Baghdad with the massive indiscriminate bombing that
virtually destroyed Dresden, Germany in 1945. At about 1:12pm ET on
Friday, March 21, as MSNBC showed live video of explosions in Baghdad,
Williams asserted: “That vista on the lower-left looks like Dresden, it
looks like some of the firebombing of Japanese cities during World War
II. There’s another one. Still going on. You hear them overhead. Either
jet aircraft or cruise missiles, but yet another explosion.”
It took nearly two weeks for Williams to redeem himself, on the April 2 NBC Nightly News, as he rejected the same analogy he had forwarded during the first days of the war: “Civilians used to be intentional military targets. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II were meant to kill civilians and then terrorize survivors. Here we’ve seen the opposite happen. U.S. forces have more than once been the targets of civilian attacks and could be forced into killing coerced human shields despite all attempts to avoid it.”
MSNBC’s coverage of the public’s reaction to the war showcased more than just the small minority who opposed using force. On the first Saturday of the war, for example, MSNBC placed Ashleigh Banfield near the Army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where at about 6:20am ET she highlighted the “wives and families, very concerned about their 101st Airborne Division husbands overseas.” Banfield added that she had “attended a candlelight vigil where we saw a chaplain, a stand-in chaplain taking over for the four chaplains who’ve been deployed, praying not only for the safety of those husbands, but also for their success in the mission.”
On March 26, just as ABC was emphasizing angry Iraqis condemning the United States, NBC’s Don Teague, in a story which ran on MSNBC as well as the NBC Nightly News, pointed out that the pro-Saddam speeches from Iraqi citizens were pure theater. Teague observed: “U.S. soldiers escorted this convoy into Iraq, but publicly, few here were singing their praises.” He showed an Iraqi man in the crowd: “Saddam good. Saddam gives eat and water and clothes.”
But then Teague suggested: “Wherever there are cameras, Saddam Hussein is still the hero. Iraqis, not yet convinced he’s lost control, worry they’ll pay with their lives for speaking against him.” A U.S. Army Sergeant, Johnny Monds, validated Teague’s observations: “They do it for the cameras because they’re scared.” ABC eventually made the same point for viewers, but not until the March 28 World News Tonight. (For more, see the section on ABC News.)
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw usually struck a middle ground between Rather’s optimism and Jennings’ pessimism. On April 2, for example, Brokaw summarized: “The war against Iraq began two weeks ago tonight with a strike at a Baghdad residence where Saddam Hussein and his sons were believed to have been staying. Now, 14 days later, after an unexpectedly difficult ground war on the way to Baghdad, American and coalition forces are within 19 miles of the Iraqi capital....A lot of progress for the United States and the allies in the last 24 hours, but now the very difficult assignment: taking on Baghdad, with the Saddam Hussein regime showing no signs of folding anytime soon.”
MSNBC offered an eclectic mix of U.S.-based anchors. Lester Holt was neutral and straightforward, and never seemed to tire as he stayed on the air for hours at a time. New 8pm ET anchor Keith Olbermann provided perhaps the most bizarre commentary on April 3, when he compared a gas station’s giveaway of $10 in free gas to vehicles bearing American flags with “suicide bombers” and “human shields.” According to Olbermann, all three are examples of “purchased patriotism.”
Olbermann suspected some drivers put flags on their cars even if they weren’t in an especially patriotic mood: “I don’t think I’m going way out on a limb here to assume that somewhere in that block’s long line of drivers near Lake Ronkonkoma waiting for their five free gallons, were a few who weren’t really that gung ho about the war, but just stuck a flag in their windshield wiper to get the gasoline gratis. Unintentional or not, that’s purchased patriotism. And as we are reminded every time we hear about Iraqi human shields and forced suicide bombers, purchased patriotism is one of the things we’re fighting against.”
