When the Post was not downplaying criticism from Democrats, it was downplaying the warnings from respected foreign policy analysts, and even decorated generals. On October 10, 2002, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, delivered a keynote address at a Washington think tank where he outlined his grave concerns about the Bush administration's war with Iraq. Among the key points made by Zinni, who endorsed Bush during the 2000 campaign and whom Bush then handpicked to serve as the United States' envoy to the Middle East, was that war with Iraq should not be the United States's top priority. "I'm not convinced we need to do this now," said Zinni. "I believe that [Saddam] can be deterred and is containable at this moment." How did the Post play the antiwar speech by one of the administration's own senior officials? It set aside 336 words, which were tucked away on page 16. (One year later Zinni spoke before the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, undressed the administration for its bungled handling of the war, and famously described its misguided preemptive war effort as "a brain fart of an idea." The Washington Post declined to cover those remarks.)
Zinni was hardly alone in getting snubbed. A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting focused on the first two weeks of February, 2003, when the debate about the war should have been raging on the public airwaves. The survey found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 6 percent were people who expressed skepticism about the looming invasion. Keep in mind, at that time a majority of Americans -- 61 percent according to one national poll -- expressed some skepticism over the war; specifically favoring diplomacy over invasion. But on television, the narrative was quite different. Additionally, according to Media Matters for America, 23 percent of U.S. senators voted to oppose the war in the fall of 2002, but only 11 percent of the senators invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows prior to the invasion were antiwar.
Then again it should not have been surprising that most guests invited by MSM producers to discuss the war on television were in favor of it, since so many of the experts were on the government payroll themselves. According to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Only 34 stories, or just 8 percent, were of independent origin.
Independence did not seem to be a trait held in particularly high regard by the MSM at the time. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, CNN's then-news chief Eason Jordan took the extraordinary step of making sure he received a personal okay from Pentagon officials regarding the retired military officers CNN planned to use as on-air commentators for its war coverage. As Jordan explained it, "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, 'Here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.' And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."
MSNBC was so nervous about employing an on-air liberal host opposing Bush's ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively in 2003, after an internal memo pointed out the legendary talk show host presented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." MSNBC executives would not confirm -- nor deny -- the existence of the report, which stressed the corporate discomfort Donahue's show might present if it opposed the war while "at the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." By canning Donahue, MSNBC made sure that cable viewers had no place to turn for a nightly opinion program whose host forcefully questioned the invasion. The irony was that at the time of Donahue's firing one month before bombs started falling on Baghdad, MSNBC officials cited the host's weak ratings as the reason for the change. In truth, Donahue was beating out Chris Matthews as MSNBC's highest-rated host.
Newspapers played it safe, too. In 2003 the Columbia Journalism Review called around to letters-page editors to gauge reader response to the looming war in Iraq and was told that at The Tennessean in Nashville letters were running 70 percent against the war, but that the newspaper was trying to run as many pro-war letters as possible in order to avoid accusations of bias.
Indeed, between the time Bush first included Iraq as part of the "axis of evil" in January 2002, and the time the invasion commenced in March 2003, the MSM didn't seem to know how to cover those who opposed the war. The press just wanted the protesters to go away. Maybe because, as influential broadcast news consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates informed its clients, covering antiwar protesters turned off news consumers, according to its survey. On October 26, 2004, antiwar protesters staged a massive rally in Washington, D.C., drawing more than 100,000 people from across the country. The next day in a small piece on page 8 that was accompanied by a photo larger than the article itself, the New York Times reported falsely that "fewer people attended than organizers had said they hoped for." Two days later, scrambling to fix the article's obvious error, yet at the same time refusing to run an actual correction, the Times published a second, sort of do-over article about the rally. As historian Todd Gitlin noted, "the Times ran a rare nonapology apology story under the peculiarly passive headline, "Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement," stating that the demonstration had drawn "100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers" this time declaring that the numbers "startled even organizers."
Meanwhile, editors at the Washington Post seemed similarly unsure how to handle the October 2004 outpouring of antiwar sentiment in its backyard, as the newspaper dramatically downplayed the story. The Post's ombudsman Michael Getler was not impressed. "Last Saturday, some 100,000 people, and possibly more, gathered in downtown Washington to protest against possible U.S. military action against Iraq," he wrote. "The Post did not put the story on the front page Sunday. It put it halfway down the front page of the Metro section, with a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements." Months later Getler detailed the Post's laundry list of misses when it came to covering the antiwar movement or even noteworthy displays of war doubt. The list is worth reading in full, while keeping in mind the extraordinary resources the Post devoted to covering the war story, albeit only certain parts of the war story:
"The [missed opportunities] started last August with the failure to record promptly the doubts of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and of Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush's national security adviser. The first public hearings on the implications of war, held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, got just a few paragraphs at the end of stories. In September, there was no spot coverage of the testimony of three retired four-star generals before the Senate Armed Services Committee warning against an attack without exhausting diplomatic options and gaining United Nations backing. Soon after, a widely reported speech by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) got one line in The Post, and large antiwar rallies in London and Rome went unreported the next day. In October, when more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to protest war, the paper put the story in the Metro section. Then came complaints that a major speech by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), one of the few senators who has taken a strong antiwar position, was missed and that the story about the most recent bin Laden audiotape failed to point out bin Laden's description of Iraqi leaders as "infidels." An overflow town meeting on war policy in Alexandria was missed. A rare story last month estimating the cost of the war, which was front-page news elsewhere, ran on Page A19. The congressional testimony the following day of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who discounted those cost estimates and who described as "wildly off the mark" previous testimony by the Army chief of staff that hundreds of thousands of troops might be needed for occupation duty, was not reported."
The MSM's awkward look-the-other-way approach to peace activists extended for years. In August 2005 Cindy Sheehan, a mother from Vacaville, California, whose son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq, set up a bring-the-troops-home vigil in Crawford, Texas, as Bush relaxed during his five-week vacation. On August 8, and one week into her campaign, the New York Times profiled Sheehan, reporting that much to the White House's chagrin, she and her antiwar protest had been "transformed into a news media phenomenon."
But had she really? The story certainly seemed compelling; an angry mom camped out on the side of the road in the 100 degree Texas heat waiting out a reluctant president who refused to meet with her but whose caravan of Secret Service SUVs actually sped past her in a cloud of dust on the way to a GOP fundraiser. Yes, reporters took an early interest. But as had become customary since 2003 when dealing with any antiwar protest story, the press proceeded with extreme caution.
Between August 5 and August 8, the time frame during which the Times called Sheehan a "phenomenon," here's how many times "Cindy Sheehan" was mentioned on CNN: eight. Between August 5 and August 8, here's how many times "Britney Spears" was mentioned on CNN: eighteen.
During the second and third weeks of August the MSM did increase its coverage of Sheehan's protest, as her antiwar camp quickly swelled in size to include hundreds of fellow demonstrators. (USA Today correctly described it as a "headline-grabbing national movement.") But there were still some notable MSM holdouts. For three weeks, as the protest story continued to mushroom, ABC's "Nightline" refused to touch it. ("Nightline" finally addressed the Sheehan story on August 19, giving it just seven minutes of air time.) The omission was telling because, despite the uptick in print coverage, the Sheehan story still had not crossed over into phenomenon territory for most television producers, and certainly not at network news outlets. For instance, between August 8 and August 18, ABC News aired more than fifty hours of morning and evening national news programming, but mentioned "Cindy Sheehan" just twenty-six times.
Compare that to the 2005 springtime news craze when Terri Schiavo's parents, who like Sheehan, staged a very public, and political, vigil for their child. The Schiavo story, cherished by conservatives, dominated the networks night after night. During the peak ten-day period of that saga, from March 20 to March 30, here's how many times ABC News mentioned "Terri Schiavo": 189. During that same stretch "Nightline" devoted four entire programs to the story. The message was clear: Schiavo, a right-to-life martyr (for some) was very big news, but Sheehan, an antiwar martyr (for some), was not.
As Sheehan's star rose through August, so did the right-wing attacks. As nervous Bush supporters watched the president's approval rating slide, they unleashed their wrath on Sheehan, labeling the mourning mom a "crazy," "anti-Semite," "left-wing moonbat," "crackpot" whose behavior bordered on "treasonous" and who was nothing more than a "hysterical noncombatant." They also charged that Sheehan was a creation of the radical left, that she was being exploited, and she did not represent mainstream Americans. That kind of organized attack was to be expected from the conservative operatives. What was not expected was how easily some in the MSM absorbed those talking points for themselves. On MSNBC, Norah O'Donnell referred to the "left-wing supporters" behind Sheehan. Later she asked a guest if Sheehan had become "a tool of the left," while pressing another on whether it was wise for Sheehan to be associated with "antiwar extremists" camped out in Crawford. (At no point during the 2005 Schiavo story did an MSNBC anchor ever suggest the pro-life parents had become "tools of the right.")
The Washington Post's Dana Milbank wondered out loud if Sheehan would be remembered as a modern-day Lyndon LaRouche, the fringe political figure who's been accused of being a cult leader and fascist, and who served a prison sentence for mail fraud and tax code violations. Later that month, Milbank gave prominent display in the Post to a right-wing activist who accused Sheehan of being a communist. Meanwhile, Milbank's Post colleague Mike Allen, appearing on CBS's Face the Nation on August 21, belittled the Crawford protesters by highlighting what he considered to be the camp's fringe elements: "Right now it's PETA, hippies, Naderites." Allen conveniently left out the fact that also in attendance at the Sheehan camp were military parents whose children had also been killed while serving in Iraq.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed an opinion column in which a critic of Sheehan asserted "Cindy Sheehan evidently thinks little of her deceased son." Asked if that was appropriate, even in an opinion column, to suggest a mother "thinks little" of her dead son, the Journal- Constitution's op-ed page editor David Beasley insisted the attack on Sheehan was fair game. Yet it's hard to imagine that if a prominent Georgia politician's son was killed in the line of duty the Journal-Constitution op-ed page would allow a columnist to assert that the politician thought little of his or her dead son.
At the same time several corporate-owned television stations refused to broadcast antiwar ads that Sheehan appeared in. In one ad Sheehan pleaded with Bush for a meeting and accused him of lying to the American people about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction and its connection to al-Qaida. An ABC affiliate in Utah owned by Clear Channel Communications informed backers their ad was an "inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City." A CBS affiliate in Boise, Idaho, also refused to air the ad, insisting its claim that Bush lied about Iraq's WMDs was not provable. The station's action was highly unusual. As the Associated Press noted in a 2004 article about political advertising, "Stations rarely reject commercials" over a concern about accuracy.
The following month, on September 24, Sheehan helped lead a massive antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., which drew between 100,000 and 200,000 participants, making it the largest United States demonstration since the war began. Nonetheless, the event was effectively boycotted by television news outlets. Instead, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC were obsessed with providing wildly overexcited coverage of Hurricane Rita, which delivered less-than-expected damage as it came ashore in the marshlands along the Texas and Louisiana borders. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, the monster storm that decapitated New Orleans just weeks before, television news outlets struggled to find compelling images of real Rita-related devastation to justify their breathless, around-the-clock coverage, while at the same time they all but refused to even acknowledge the historic antiwar rally.
Question: If between 100,000 and 200,000 pro-war demonstrators had assembled in the nation's capital on that same September 2005 weekend and cheered Bush outside the White House, would the MSM have given them just cursory coverage, Rita or no Rita?
Next page: The Times' WMD fiasco will be taught in journalism schools for years