All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It was the verbal shot heard ‘round the world on Saturday morning, echoing long into the Sunday morning talk shows: Former US Commander Calls Iraq a "Nightmare."

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez – the top military commander in Iraq from 2004-2006, who resigned after Abu Ghraib – pulled no punches in his speech to the Military Reporters and Editors conference Friday.

The New York Times coverage led off:

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

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A troubling read in the current Broadcasting and Cable magazine spells it out in no uncertain terms: this Iraq war is bad for business.

According to the piece:

After more than four years into the war in Iraq, television news organizations have awakened to their own grim reality: They’re spending millions of dollars a year to operate in a country where security costs them thousands of dollars a day….

And despite the fact that Iraq remains the largest single news story in the world and an obligation for U.S. news organizations, coverage has devolved into a tired drumbeat of insurgent mayhem—and viewers are tuning out. Not only are ratings stagnating, but Iraq reports are not bringing in the new viewers that the declining genre so desperately needs.

The bottom line in all this, of course, is the bottom line. Media companies are in a profit business, and if they’re not going to give their investors a steady return … they’re not going to stick around.

We all know this and we’re all familiar with the basic economics of the issue. And while much hand-wringing is done over the problem – TimesSelect is dead, newsrooms are shrinking, etc – very little is suggested along the lines of solutions. So in the interest of airing different ideas along those lines, Professor Julian Friedland offers his suggestion in today’s Denver Post: Get the government involved. (Gulp.)

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Last week it was reported that the BBC had hired an outside group to investigate whether or not they had a problem with ideologicial bias. My first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if every outlet could do that?” My second thought was “Well, did they find out?” According to the Telegraph’s reporting on the study:

After a year-long investigation the report maintains that the corporation’s coverage of day-to-day politics is fair and impartial.

But it says coverage of Live 8, the 2005 anti-poverty concerts organised by rock star campaigners Bob Geldof and Bono and writer Richard Curtis, failed to properly debate the issues raised.

This was echoed in the (rabbit hole alert) BBC’s reporting of the BBC investigation of BBC content as well:

The BBC needs to take more care to ensure it is impartial, according to a report commissioned by the corporation.

That seemed about right to me: It's certainly reasonable, after all, to expect a reporter covering a story like this to let the facts speak for themselves and not cheerlead for one side or the other.

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What are the acceptable terms of interviews with rarely interviewed government officials? Earlier this week we took note of some comments from Gareth Butler, editor of the BBC's "The Politics Show." He wrote that a recent interview with British Prime Minister Tony Blair involved far fewer "shenanigans" from the PM's office ("you can't ask questions about this or that, you can only have x minutes, it has to be such-and-such a location") than most people assumed occurred with such rare sit-downs.

We asked Scott Pelley, who recently conducted a lengthy interview with President George W. Bush for "60 Minutes," about what the terms were – if any – for that exclusive. Pelley, who just returned from Iraq, was able to respond to us today. Here's what he told us in an e-mail:

The White House knows it cannot impose any limits on the scope of questioning. As a result, they never ask for such limits.

The limit they can, and do, impose is on time. When we did the interview at Camp David they were very strict. We had 10 minutes for the walk and talk and 20 minutes for the sit down.

In both venues, a White House staffer stood behind the president holding up time cards (5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, etc.) so that I could see them. The time restraint is a clever way to curtail follow up questions.

Every interview with a president is, foremost, a time management game. To compensate for this, a good interviewer narrows the scope of the interview and allows himself time for follow ups. I call this going “narrow and deep.” When people ask me, “Why didn’t you ask him …?” -- that’s my answer.

After every interview with the president, I spend the next several nights, sleepless, thinking about what I should have asked.

Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Bob Giles, veteran journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Here, Giles discusses the harm in U.S. news outlets' lack of tough questions. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.

Not long ago, I was with a group of journalists looking at videotapes of a BBC reporter interviewing British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The reporter was clearly well informed and was aggressively pressing Blair when the prime minister’s answers seemed less than forthcoming. It was wonderful journalistic combat and highly informative for the audience.

BBC reporters routinely have opportunities to sit down with the prime minister for a face-to-face interview. The broadcasts, which can be seen and the transcripts reviewed online, come off as lively exchanges highlighted by sharp questions, occasional interjections by the reporter and relentless probing for clarity in the prime minister’s responses.

These interviews represent a striking contrast with the U.S. television, where there is an absence of spirited inquiry. Public officials are treated with courtesy, which is appropriate, but on balance are accorded far too many opportunities to respond to reporters’ queries without challenge. When the reporter fails to probe more deeply, he or she becomes simply an electronic stenographer providing the elected official or official spokesperson a video platform for getting out the message.

A recent CBS News Investigative Unit story offers a case in point.

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Should there be a separation between church and fourth estate?

That's the question they're asking in Britain, where the BBC is debating whether or not news personalities should be wearing religious imagery on the air. The debate started two weeks ago, when the Daily Mail reported that "in yet another example of PC gone mad, a necklace worn by TV newsreader Fiona Bruce sparked a row among BBC bosses." Bruce wears a necklace with a small cross on it.

The issue came up in a discussion about whether or not a female Muslim newscaster would be permitted to wear a headscarf on the air. Bruce, to be clear, has not been banned from wearing the cross, and the BBC has not banned any other religious clothing on air. But the debate, as Peter Horrocks, head of TV News, wrote in a blog post, "puts in opposition some principles the BBC stands for. The BBC is a supporter of freedom of expression. Equally we want our newsreaders to be seen as entirely impartial. Any religious clothing or insignia they wear could make some viewers question their impartiality."

Horrocks asked viewers for their thoughts, and while some said that no religious imagery of any kind should be worn on the air, most argued that on-air newscasters should be able to wear any religious symbols they want.

I agree with the majority here, and I don't think that a cross, or a headscarf, in any way compromises one's ability to accurately present the news. But I do think that some viewers might look more skeptically at news because of the religious symbols worn by a newscaster. Horrocks argues, rightly I think, that some religious clothing could be problematic for reasons having more to do with traditional TV production issues than religious beliefs. "The wearing of a full veil, for instance, would hinder communication with the audience," he writes. "A large shiny cross would be too distracting."

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Hi, it’s Brian, writing from Berlin. I have one English language TV channel in my apartment here, and, though I should really be watching the local channels to improve my German, I can’t help but occasionally migrate back to the comforting refuge of TV in my native language. (Nothing against the TV here, but I can only take so many dubbed episodes of “The Simpsons” before wanting to throw the remote in frustration. My German is bad enough that I can only understand a few of the jokes, and, besides, they don’t seem translate all that well.)

My English-language oasis is BBC World, a 24 hour news channel that’s pretty good, particularly when compared to the 24 hour news channels in the U.S. And it has at least one offering that is utterly fantastic: A documentary series called “Holidays in the Danger Zone,” which ran repeatedly over the weekend.

The series is simple: A cameraman and correspondent visit an undercovered locale such as Kyrgyzstan or the Euphrates river and tell its stories, often with the help of local guides who themselves become central characters in the tale. This isn’t just a series of standups. It’s more of a travelogue in which the reactions of the correspondents feature prominently, as do the lamentations of the guides.

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Here’s a trendy little phrase for you to share with your friends and neighbors: climate porn. That’s what a (Labour-leaning) British think tank calls the U.K. media’s extensive use of apocalyptic descriptions and images of climate change, which the organization views as commercially motivated. Simon Retellack, who commissioned the study, told BBC News: "It is appropriate to call [what some of these groups publish] 'climate porn', because on some level it is like a disaster movie. The public become disempowered because it's too big for them; and when it sounds like science fiction, there is an element of the unreal there." The report laments that while climate change has been covered exhaustively "there had been no analysis of what the coverage amounted to and what impact it might be having."

The Institute for Public Policy Research categorized the coverage as such:

Alarmism, characterised by images and words of catastrophe

Settlerdom, in which "common sense" is used to argue against the scientific consensus

Rhetorical scepticism, which argues the science is bad and the dangers hyped

Techno-optimism, the argument that technology can solve the problem

The news outlets criticized (criticised?) argue that they are simply calling attention to an important issue. Ian Birrell, deputy editor of the Independent – which was identified in the study as one of the “alarmist” publications – told the BBC: "You put on your front page what you deem important and what you think is important to your readers.” He added that charges that the paper didn’t include more solution-oriented stories are inaccurate: “while we're campaigning on big issues such as ice caps, we also do a large amount on how people can change their own lives, through cycling, installing energy-efficient lighting, recycling, food miles; we've been equally committed on these issues."

Retallack argued otherwise: "Every newspaper is a commercial organization and when you have a terrifying image on the front of the paper, you are likely to sell more copies than when you write about solutions." Makes you wonder which of these two magazine covers sold more copies.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, David Vaina, a research associate at the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, compares one week’s worth of coverage of the Middle East crisis on CBS News with that of BBC News. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here’s David:

No one can deny that network news today faces a number of challenges.
First, there is the well-documented decline in audience numbers.
According to recent estimates, viewership for the Big Three networks
has decreased by 25 million (or 48%) since 1980, the year that CNN
started.

Another challenge for network TV comes from the Internet. More and
more Americans are turning to the Internet for their daily news. And
while it used to be that Old Media only had to worry about how to
engage more teens and young adults, new survey data from Pew Research
suggest that as many 50- to 64-year olds regularly get their news online
as 18-year olds.

Clearly, network television now has a solid foothold in online media
but without a way to generate more advertising revenue from the Web,
there may not be as much money to reinvest in newsgathering operations
that can provide us with high-quality, informative programming.

Now, there is what some media critics have called the next British
invasion. Increasingly, several British media outlets have launched
campaigns to expand their audience reach in the United States.

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As the Middle East conflict continues to dominate headlines, questions are inevitably arising about whether other major conflicts throughout the world are getting the coverage that they are due. We have wondered along with others about whether “Iraq fatigue” might be setting in. In his Washington Post chat this afternoon, Howard Kurtz griped, along with his readers, that “Iraq has gotten short shrift over the last two weeks. For television, in particular, most of the reporters who were in Iraq are now in Israel and Lebanon. I understand the impulse -- the Mideast war is new and novel, while the carnage in Iraq is a three-year-old story that has a certain repetitive quality -- but it's still a place where 130,000 American troops are fighting, and where the outcome is anything but certain.”

We’ve mentioned BBC News’ new blog, The Editors, before -- it’s the Beeb’s look inside its own editorial operations. Today on the site, Craig Oliver, the editor of the BBC’s “Ten O’Clock News” explains the reasoning behind what amount of coverage that three major conflicts throughout the world receive by relaying some “stark statistics” about each conflict that seem to contradict the amount coverage each has received:

Around 30 to 40 people are killed every day in the current Israel/Lebanon conflict.

About 100 people are killed every day in the violence in Iraq.

And 1,200 people are killed every day in the war in the Congo.

All three of these stories are due to appear on tonight's Ten O'Clock News. They will probably run in that order - with the Middle East getting by far the most attention.

Does this say something about how we value human life? It's a fair question and one I worry about...

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