Margie Reedy's visit to campus yesterday to talk about bias in the media as it relates to Iraq was both timely and informative. In her talk, Reedy spoke of the popularity of Fox News and the danger of any news media outlets straying from an objective standard in their reporting.
The problem of biased reporting is especially acute now, as we are a little over a month away from a crucial presidential contest and many Americans use cable news as their primary source of political information.
The march to war in Iraq and the beginning of the conflict in that nation showcased a media that seemed unconcerned with showing the flip side of the coin.
They eagerly consumed the administration's case for war without vigorously questioning the facts. When it turned out that some of the assumptions on which the war had been based were false, they shrugged their shoulders and offered half-hearted apologies. When protests were covered, they were labeled either "anti-war" or "pro-troops," thereby implying that those who were anti-war were also anti-troops. This was rarely the case.
As Fox News continued to wave its little American flag in the corner, it reported much about the administration's case for war and little against it.
This bias would be disturbing enough if it involved just the lead up to the war, but it has not been that limited. Scant attention has been paid to the rapidly climbing American casualty figure in the past month, as Patrice Taddonio's article mentions today.
As a presidential election takes center stage, our cable news cannot seem to comprehensively report on a war that one of the candidates built the case for and initiated. Many mainstream think tanks and international organizations have asserted that the situation on the ground is going from bad to worse, but their assessments get scant airtime in the 24-hour news cycle.
Why has news coverage so closely conformed to the press releases from Pennsylvania Avenue? American news organizations, with their focus on profit, have little incentive to do hard-hitting investigative reporting. Investigations are expensive and are not guaranteed to be entertaining; meanwhile, talking (or more appropriately shouting) heads are easy to come by and good for diversion.
The Dan Rather debacle at CBS News certainly won't help spur any news program, cable or network, to invest time and money in aggressive reporting - the contrast The Washington Post's Watergate investigation couldn't be more striking or disheartening.
When the news goes soft, Americans get hit hard. We are receiving far less good information than we should, given that the leader of the free world is up for reelection and our troops are fighting en masse overseas.
Fox and the others need to understand that it's not unpatriotic to tell the truth, but it's despicable to withhold it and treat the American voters as children. Cable news has a lot of growing up to do, and fast.
