Newswise — Major media outlets in the United States and Britain inadequately reported both the lead-up to war with Iraq and its aftermath, according to a new study from the University of Maryland.
The study, released by the university's Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), found that media coverage failed to challenge the administration's merging of its campaign against Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) into the "War on Terror." It also found that media coverage uncritically repeated the administration's representation of the dimensions and immediacy of the WMD threat.
"Too many journalists acted as virtual stenographers for the current administration, in effect validating President Bush's linkage of terrorism, Iraq and weapons of mass destruction," says the study's author Susan D. Moeller, a University of Maryland journalism professor.
Based on a systematic content analysis, the study found a pattern of coverage in major U.S. media outlets, before and after the Iraqi war, that may have contributed to public confusion, including: --presenting WMD as a "monolithic menace" " lumping nuclear, chemical and biological weapons into a single category, thereby obscuring differences in potential harm, availability and ease of use (the study describes this as a "pattern of imprecision." );
--accepting uncritically the Bush administration's characterization of its campaign against WMD as part of the war on terror;
--providing too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats and policy options;
--providing too little coverage of policy options beyond "pre-emptive war" and "regime change," and burying coverage of alternative views in the back pages of the newspaper.
The study documented differences in U.S. and U.K. coverage of these issues. It found that the British press gave greater attention to the ramifications of U.S. policy for other nations and to the work of international agencies such as the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency. "These distinctions may reflect split loyalties in the U.K. between European and U.S. allies and press conventions that favor sharper questioning of official policy," Moeller suggests.
While citing some specific journalists whose work was exemplary, the study nonetheless suggests that the very structure of American journalism may be an underlying cause of misleading coverage. "The 'inverted pyramid' style of news writing " which places the most 'important' information first " produced much greater attention to the administration's point of view on WMD issues, at the expense of alternative perspectives," Moeller says.
To address these deficiencies, the study offers news editors, reporters and producers a series of recommendations. These include calls for:
--more explicit distinctions between acts of terrorism and the acquisition or use of WMD " as reporters provided during the Clinton administration;
--better differentiation of the varying degrees of threat posed by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons " rather than treating WMD as a monolithic threat;
--more prominent placement of dissenting domestic and international voices;
--greater mindfulness of the politicized language and terms used to frame the debate and define individual and state actors.
Moeller's study evaluated both the number of stories and their qualitative aspects during three periods of intensive WMD coverage — May 2003, when combat operations in Iraq were officially said to have ended and the hunt for WMDs escalated; October 2002, when Congress approved military action to disarm Iraq and when revelations about North Korean nuclear capabilities surfaced; and May 1998, when nuclear tensions escalated between India and Pakistan. Moeller analyzed reporting by the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and National Public Radio. In Britain, she evaluated coverage by The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Economist.
"The United States government initiated war against Iraq on the basis of an inaccurate representation of the scope and immediacy of the threat posed," writes CISSM director John Steinbruner in the foreword to the study. "So far, debate about this problem has focused largely on the Executive Branch, but Congress, the media, independent security analysts"¦are all implicated." He adds that Moeller's study is intended to contribute to a "necessary process of reflection and correction."
The full study is available at http://www.cissm.umd.edu/documents/WMDstudy_full.pdf. A summary is available at: http://www.cissm.umd.edu/documents/WMDstudy_short.pdf. It was prepared as part of the program on Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security at CISSM.
RSS