Grading TV's War News

Fox News Channel and Embedded Reporters Excelled, While Peter Jennings and Peter Arnett Flunked

Fox News Channel

Anchors and commentators on the Fox News Channel refused to adopt the liberal media’s standard for “objective” war reporting, where objectivity demanded an indifference to whether America succeeded or failed. “There is nothing wrong with taking sides here,” FNC’s Neil Cavuto stated in an on-air reply to a critic on March 28. “You see no difference between a government that oppresses people, and one that does not, but I do.”

fnctbYet this patriotic attitude did not compromise the quality of FNC’s war reporting and analysis. Indeed, by refusing to embrace the reflexive skepticism of most of the media elite, FNC’s audience was not misled by the unwarranted second-guessing and negativism that tainted other networks’ war news. On his 6pm ET Special Report with Brit Hume, anchor Brit Hume provided an excellent one-hour summary of the war each night. The Fox anchor with the most face time, Shepard Smith, worked hard to keep the focus of the story exactly where it belonged: in the war zone, with Fox’s embedded battlefield reporters.

Those who watched Fox were well-served by the networks’ refusal to fall into the standard traps of repeating liberal conventional wisdom as fact. On March 24, for example, the same night Jennings led with bad news about a downed helicopter and termed the U.S. advance “cautious,” Hume on his Special Report explored whether doubts about the military’s plan were valid at that point.

Hume reported, “In the air and on the ground, U.S. commanders say the war is going well. But the POWs taken over the weekend, and the first battlefield casualties, of any moment have generated much excitement in the U.S. media, including a remarkable story in the Washington Post declaring that the losses had raised doubts about the military’s strategy.”

Hume asked an FNC military analyst, retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, “What about this strategy? Is it time for it to be changed? And if not, why not?” McInerney replied that, “It’s a brilliant strategy. It’s been planned extremely well and it’s now being executed extraordinarily....The Third Infantry Division has raced the distance equivalent to [that] from Normandy to Belgium, unprecedented in the history of warfare. Even George Patton would be extraordinarily proud and envious of this.”

Hume broke in: “Well, wait a minute. I know, but we got from Normandy to Belgium [before]. What’s so special about this?” The difference, McInerney replied, was that while the coalition had moved 600 kilometers in four days in Iraq, moving from Normandy to Belgium “took us three months. And the fact is, is they have not had a Scud missile fired at Israel or Kuwait. We haven’t had one airplane shot down. They have not launched one fighter sortie against us and our casualties have been very light. This is an extraordinary accomplishment by any measure. Don’t change the strategy. Just continue to execute it.”

When it came to covering the anti-war protesters, FNC also broke with the rest of the media pack. On March 22, the day CNN offered sympathetic and sanitized coverage of anti-war demonstrators, FNC’s Rebecca Gomez stressed that, “the vast majority of Americans support President Bush and his decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom....But the anti-crowd, anti-war crowd, refuses to acknowledge the polls and once again shut down and disrupted a great part of the Big Apple.”

Gomez showed a taped interview in which she asked one protester, a woman, whether she would “agree with the decision that Saddam Hussein needed to go?” The woman affirmed, “Yeah.” Gomez then asked, “But you don’t agree that it should have been done by a war?” Again, the woman said, “Yeah.” Gomez then asked the logical follow-up, “So then how?” The woman offered no response other than a confused sigh.

Gomez also told anchor Gregg Jarrett that some in the crowd had been hostile: “They were cursing at us; they were pushing us. You know, we were trying to do interviews and they were getting in the way, and pushing the microphone, and saying to us a lot of things that I can’t mention on television, and just very angry at the media, thinking that somehow we’re helping this war effort that they’re against.”

The main blemish on FNC’s war record occurred as weekend host Geraldo Rivera, whose reputation for theatrics is well-known, was traveling with the Third Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in central Iraq. During a report which aired at about 11:35pm ET on March 30, Rivera boastfully disclosed the unit’s mission — to attack irregular Iraqi forces attacking coalition supply lines near the city of an-Najaf, a mission he sketched out in the desert sand.

“The 101st, the unit to which I have been assigned, is working in an-Najaf,” Rivera revealed. “Now, the first and second brigades have cut off the south of an-Najaf, and the north of an-Najaf. The unit that I’m with, the third brigade, is now going to move in here to cut off the west of an-Najaf. So they’re effectively going to surround it. I’m going up there in just a couple of hours.” Rivera left Iraq soon after the incident, although he rejoined the 101st after it had safely established itself in Baghdad.