News to Turn the Nation

Joe Mariani, of Guardian WatchBlog thinks the news media is intent on breaking the stubborn will of the American people to support the President along the many fronts in the War on Terror:

It wasn't enough for the Left when the "mainstream" media made it a point to include the daily US soldier body count from Iraq in every news report in every medium. It wasn't enough when they unapologetically added the number of those killed in accidents in Iraq -- which, frankly, could have happened almost anywhere -- to those killed in combat, just to inflate the American body count further. It wasn't enough for the Left that, for the last half of 2003, the media talking heads almost gleefully announced a second daily Iraq soldier body count, with the tagline, "since President Bush declared major combat over on May first." Support for the liberation of Iraq from dictator Saddam Hussein remained strong, despite the best efforts of the Left to instill an anti-war attitude into every viewer.

Mariani notes various turns of strategy in this effort. Similarly, John Hawkins suggests that it's a pattern of behavior that leads a large portion of the American audience to be suspicious to the point of anger of Ted Koppel's lament-the-lives special:

Put simply, there are a lot of people, myself, who think the left leaning media's coverage of this war has been, largely for political and ideological reasons, lopsided to the point of being despicable. Remembering the lives ended and forever altered by the war is important, but obsessively playing up every life lost, every problem, and dramatically exaggerating every negative while either ignoring or downplaying the reasoning behind the war, what we're trying to do, and all the positive things that have been accomplished, should in no way, shape, or form, be considered to be objectively "reporting the news".

Hawkins believes that a non-sweeps-week production by Brit Hume would be received differently. Mariani asks why the casualties from Afghanistan aren't included in the honor roll. Me, I wonder if anybody in Koppel's crew considered splitting the screen to show pictures of smiling Iraqi children, a captured Saddam Hussein, or soldiers at work helping with reconstruction. The basic idea — names and faces, in this case — doesn't really convey the message of a thing. Presentation, author, and context do that.

Lane Core says the same, with reference to the President's belief that the media does not represent the public:

Journalism is politics by another name. The idea that "the press" represents "the people" is, and always was, smoke & mirrors. The press isn't objective; the press was never objective. The press, in its various manifestations, represents only those people who happen to agree with it. ...

If you follow a story in mainstream media and in conservative media, you'd often be tempted to think they're covering two different stories, the facts presented are so different and their presentation so different.

I agree with Lane that there's nothing wrong with this state of affairs, as long as one can turn to varying sources and find each reasonably explicit about its angle. In fact, that's ultimately a more effective way to dig through to the reality, because the contrast highlights which facts are identical (objectively true), similar (somewhat debatable), or conflicting (subjectively layered).

Of course, the mainstream media will guard the "objective" label on its door like a foreign hooker guards a clean statement of health. For one thing, admitting to partisanship lessens the target demographic (on paper, at least). For another, if the biases were well delineated, there would no longer be plausible deniability or basis for outrage when people point out which side of a dispute, controversy, or war each version of a story helps.