| Journalism professor: Media is failing America BY SALLY ACHARYA Forty-four percent of Americans polled on the brink of the Iraq invasion believed that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers came from Iraq. Sixty-five percent thought that Saddam Hussein was allied with al Qaeda. And 41 percent in that same Knight-Ridder poll were convinced that Iraq already had nuclear weapons. To Robert Jensen ’85, such mistaken beliefs are evidence that the U.S. media isn’t doing its job. “I have a lot of affection for the craft,” says the journalism professor at the University of Texas. “[But] the only way journalism is going to advance is if people who have that affection for the craft are willing to hold it accountable.” Jensen spoke last week at a School of International Service Foreign Policy Talk, “A Citizen’s Guide to the Media, National Security, and the War on Terror.” The media’s job, he said, is to serve as an independent source of information that equips people for their duties as citizens by providing them not only with facts, but with a context and the widest possible range of viewpoints about those facts. After all, “we don’t come to political judgment by going into a cave and meditating. We come to it by rubbing up against other political perspectives.” But the media “failed in particularly profound ways in the run-up to the Mideast invasion,” he said. Many statements made by the Bush administration as it geared up for the invasion were inaccurate, although whether they were deliberate lies or intelligence failures is still being debated, he said. The media, however, failed at the time to examine the reasons given for the impending war. Instead, he said, it simply reported what the administration was saying, neither investigating the claims nor even quoting people who questioned the claims. While an opposing viewpoint was sometimes included—buried, as often as not, in a paragraph near the bottom—the narrow notion of what constituted “opposition” left anyone who questioned the wisdom or legality of the invasion out of the conversation. News shows, for instance, would “balance a general with a retired general, and a Bush administration official with a Clinton official,” he said. In January and February of 2003, as the Bush administration geared for war, 76 percent of guests on network talk shows were current or former administration officials, while less than 1 percent were antiwar activists, he said. “The media created a pattern of reporting that allowed people to get the wrong impression,” he said. The tendency to channel the comments of officials, and the lack of context and critical viewpoints, left the public so ill-informed on the brink of war that large numbers held outlandish beliefs about Iraq—including the belief that Iraq had nuclear weapons, a claim never put forth by the Bush administration. Jensen said it’s possible to get a more balanced sense of the news by reading a variety of sources. In addition to the established U.S. papers such as the Washington Post and New York Times—“there’s a lot of good information, and it’s not all fiction”—he suggested reading non-mainstream news sources, often found on the Web, and the foreign press. High quality, vibrant reporting in English can be found online in papers from Britain and South Asia, he noted. But while the resources exist for individuals to seek out a range of sources, the U.S. media is falling short of the mark for the country as a whole, he said. “It’s especially in times of national crisis and war that we need an independent journalism the most,” Jensen said. “And it’s at these moments that journalism failed the most.” |
