For years, the chief media problem with coverage of global warming was a simple one: too much balance. No matter what the scientific consensus, news reports would suggest a serious debate was raging in the world of climate specialists. In fact, no such debate was happening (Extra!, 11-12/04). By the mid-1990s, climate scientists were confident that there was a measurable warming of the Earth, and that human activity had some discernible impact on climate change.

Much of the journalism of the period, however, adopted a "he said/she said" approach, giving space to critics, often industry-backed, who dismissed the scientific consensus. Coverage of this sort matched the advice of longtime GOP strategist Frank Luntz, who advised the party in a 2002 memo (New York Times, 3/2/03): "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly.... Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

In the last few years, the global warming consensus--and the scientific knowledge underpinning it--has only strengthened. A study in the journal Science (12/3/04) found that out of 928 peer-reviewed articles on the subject of climate change from 1993 and 2003, not a single one took issue with the idea that human-caused warming was ongoing.* And in most instances, news reporters now steer clear of industry-sponsored think tanks and warming "skeptics" lurking on the fringes on the scientific community.

In the aftermath of the racist outburst that got talkshow host Don Imus' dropped from CBS radio and MSNBC--referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos"--a Washington Post editorial (4/10/07) posed a question many critics have been asking for years: How do prestigious journalists defend their cozy relationship with a well-known bigot?

As the Post put it: "But those who bask in the glow of his radio show ought to consider whether they should continue doing so. After all, you're judged by the company you keep." Since discovering Imus' long record of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia is not difficult (FAIR Action Alert, 4/9/07), it's a question reporters should have been asking long ago--FAIR posed the very same question to NBC's Tim Russert six years ago, for example (Action Alert, 3/1/00).

When journalist Phil Nobile (TomPaine.com, 6/28/01) presented many top pundits with evidence of Imus' bigotry, few (of the white ones, anyway) seemed to think what Imus was saying should affect their decisions to appear on his program. Nobile noted that Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz wrote in his 1996 book Hot Air that "Imus's sexist, homophobic and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private."

Really? Do Washington journalists really call people "thieving Jews"--and then make mock apologies, saying that the phrase is "redundant" (Imus in the Morning, 12/15/04)? Did they really call Clinton's attorney general "old Bigfoot shaky Janet Reno," taunting her for her Parkinson's disease (Imus in the Morning, 6/12/01)? Do they really laugh uproariously at the news of hundreds of Haitians drowning (Imus in the Morning, 3/20-24/00)? If so, Kurtz has been sitting on a great many scoops.

While much has been written about how credulous reporting about the Bush administration’s bogus weapons claims paved the way for the Iraq War, it’s important to remember that media cheerleading for the war only intensified once the bombs started falling—a dismal performance documented here with examples from the first celebration of “shock and awe” to the swooning over George W. Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished.” These quotes are excerpted from “Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline,” published on FAIR.org (3/19/07).


An awesome performance

“We don’t want to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we’re gonna own that country.”
—NBC’s Tom Brokaw (3/19/03)

“Suddenly in the sky, in the direction of Basra, or east of where we were, the sky just lit up with artillery, and it was an awesome performance of artillery to soften
up the positions where we were heading.”
—Embedded NBC correspondent Chip Reid (3/21/03)


“I’m not messing with people who want to say this attack is illegal, it’s not warranted, it’s not justified—I’m not going to argue with you people anymore. Take your propaganda to somebody else who might believe it.”
—Rush Limbaugh (quoted in New York Post, 3/21/03)

“We got stabbed in the back by those assholes in France and the rest of them. Enough of Tom Daschle, who is disgraceful, and all the rest—enough of that.”
—Don Imus (quoted in New York Post, 3/21/03)

Like a scalpel

“In our view, President Bush has built a strong case for the invasion of Iraq, a case that will be overwhelming with the inevitable discovery of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein is hiding.”
—Oregonian editorial (3/20/03)

“HUGE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACTORY FOUND IN SO IRAQ. . . . REPORTS: 30 IRAQIS SURRENDER AT CHEM WEAPONS PLANT. . . . COAL TROOPS HOLDING IRAQI IN CHARGE OF CHEM WEAPONS.”
—Fox News Channel (3/23/03)

“One important new discovery: U.S. officials say, up the road from Nasarijah, in a town called Najaf, they believe that they have captured a chemical weapons plant and, perhaps more important, the commanding general of that facility. One U.S. official said he is a potential ‘gold mine’ about the weapons Saddam Hussein says he doesn’t have.”
—ABC’s John McWethy (3/23/03)

“Word tonight that U.S. forces may have found what U.N. inspectors spent months searching for, a facility suspected to be a chemical weapons plant, uncovered by ground troops on the way north to Baghdad.”
—NBC’s Tom Brokaw (3/23/03)

“The first solid confirmed existence of chemical weapons by the Iraqi army. . . . 20 BM-21 medium-range rockets with warheads containing sarin nerve and mustard gas. . . . would vindicate the administration’s claims that the Iraqis had chemicals all along.”
—Embedded NPR reporter John Burnett (4/7/03)

At the moment, polls show former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a wide lead over his Republican counterparts, and senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama leading the Democratic field. The media’s campaign storyline is shaped largely to conform to these findings. Time magazine (3/22/07) recently predicted that “the political rule book has been stuffed into a shredder this year,” the “conventional wisdom” shattered by the apparently inevitable victory of current front-runners like Giuliani or Hillary Clinton.

A look back at past election cycles shows such predictions are unwise. Early polling of the 2004 Democratic nominees (e.g., CBS News poll, 12/14–16/03) showed eventual nominee John Kerry in the middle of the pack, trailing Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. An August 2003 USA Today/Gallup poll (8/25–26/03) showed front-runner Lieberman with a 10-point lead over Gephardt. As the dynamics of the nomination race shifted, so did the polls—but not in the direction of the eventual winner; by January 2004 (Newsweek poll, 1/2–5/04), Howard Dean was leading the pack, followed closely by Wesley Clark.

The Democratic race was similarly competitive in 1992, and the polls then were equally useless in helping to predict the eventual nominee. In March 1991, Paul Tsongas, Mario Cuomo and Dick Gephardt were the frontrunners, according to one survey of New Hampshire voters (Boston Globe, 3/31/91). Bill Clinton was hardly a factor.

A reader asked Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks in an online chat (WashingtonPost.com, 5/8/07; cited in Editor & Publisher, 5/8/07) why we were hearing so much about Iranian weapons in Iraq, but “we hardly ever see the press actually ask about the pretty well-known trail of money that leads from Saudi Arabia to the insurgents.” Ricks’ answer was instructive:





Actually, Ricks exposes not the “vulnerabilities of journalism” but the failures of journalists in his response. Clearly, Bush administration officials are interested parties with a long track record of dubious intelligence claims. Somehow, though, if they say something previously said by less politically invested people on the ground—who are in a better position to know the facts—it magically transforms from “rumor” into something worth publishing.

If your job is to inform the public, that makes no sense; it only follows if you see your role as transmitting the official line. —J.N.

On May 15, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Bush administration’s extraordinary efforts in March 2004 to gain legal approval for the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. The story was startling, at the very least—involving top officials confronting each other in the hospital room of a seriously ill Attorney General John Ashcroft—but it attracted little media curiosity.

The incident was first reported in January 2006 by the New York Times (1/1/06) and Newsweek (1/9/06) to little notice. Comey’s testimony added the critical detail that, acting as attorney general due to Ashcroft’s illness, he refused to sign on to an extension of the wiretapping program, at least in part because the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel argued that it was illegal. Several Justice Department officials, including Comey and Ashcroft, were apparently ready to resign if they were overruled by the White House.

On March 10, 2004, then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and chief of staff Andrew Card decided to go to Ashcroft’s bedside to seek approval for the wiretapping program, despite Ashcroft’s having temporarily stepped down. When Comey learned of Gonzales and Card’s plan, he and FBI Director Robert Mueller met them at the hospital, where Ashcroft dramatically rebuffed the attempt to get him to overrule his replacement. Weeks later, unspecified changes were made to the wiretapping plan, and the Justice Department dropped its opposition.

Summing up the media’s conventional wisdom about the congressional vote to approve funding for the Iraq War with no timeline for withdrawal, the Los Angeles Times wrote (5/25/07): “Unable to overcome the president’s veto of their plan to set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, Democrats have been left to focus on what to do next.”

That, in a nutshell, is what was wrong with the coverage of the war funding debate. In fact, if the Democratic-controlled Congress wanted to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, it didn’t have to pass the bill over George W. Bush’s veto; it just had to make clear that no Iraq War spending bill without a timeline would be forthcoming. Given that the Constitution requires Congress to approve all spending, Bush needs Congress’s approval to continue the war—Congress does not need Bush’s approval to end the war.

Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of such a strategy, but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.

Unfortunately, some leading pundits instead gave deeply misleading, unhelpful summaries of how the American constitutional system works. Here’s New York Times columnist David Brooks on CNN’s Reliable Sources (5/27/07):

And Bill O’Reilly Is Far-Right

“But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right.”
—Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 5/30/07) talking to Sen. John McCain about the immigration bill

Militia Switch

In an article on the search for four captured British mercenaries and their civilian client, the New York Times (6/1/07) reported that “the gunmen . . . are believed to be members of the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the populist Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.” In support of this assertion, the story noted that the gunmen are suspected to have “received assistance from employees at the Finance Ministry complex, where the abductions occurred,” and pointed out that “the finance minister, Bayan Jabr, is a Shiite and a former interior minister who oversaw the rapid growth of Iraq’s security forces at a time when Sunni and American officials accused the ministry of allowing its ranks to be infiltrated by militiamen.” What the Times didn’t note is that Jabr is a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose militia, the Badr Organization, has a bitter and often violent rivalry with the Mahdi Army—a fact that might have raised doubts about the paper’s unattributed suspicions.

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