http://tyndallreport.com/ http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5147 Andrew Tyndall 2010-08-28T02:56:59-08:00 http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5146 Andrew Tyndall 2010-08-27T06:22:14-08:00 http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5145 Andrew Tyndall 2010-08-26T09:34:18-08:00 http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5144 Andrew Tyndall 2010-08-25T10:19:01-08:00 http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5143 Andrew Tyndall 2010-08-05T08:36:37-08:00 American TV Networks Grapple with Stateless WikiLeaks.org http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5142 Andrew Tyndall 2010-07-30T09:05:19-08:00 Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.org seemed to snub the network nightly newscasts when he picked print media to publicize his Afghanistan War scoop. He selected two newspapers and a magazine as the recipients of his shared exclusive, a three-week window of embargoed access to his document dump of 92,000 secret Pentagon logs, covering the fighting in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009.

The New York Times in the United States, The Guardian in England and der Spiegel in Germany were the mainstream media outlets Assange chose as his best prospects for leveraging eyecatching headlines in order to boost traffic to his online archive and encourage crowdsourced data-mining. One might expect the broadcast networks and their cable news colleagues to respond with sour grapes at Assange's disdain. Sure enough, "Nothing New Here," is the refrain in the latest of Ben Craw's vintage video mash-ups at Huffington Post. He calls it "a Frenzy of Frantic Yawning."

You will note, however, that few of the talking heads Craw selected to make his point that WikiLeaks.org's insights into the conduct of this nine-year-long war were being dismissed out of hand--very few of them--came from the network nightly newscasts. Indeed the Afghanistan War was the Story of the Day on Monday on Tuesday, being selected to lead all three newscasts on both days and picking up another lead, on CBS on Thursday. Passed-over Pentagon correspondents at CBS, NBC and ABC gave the document dump proper respect:

"Some of these reports were really quite stunning to me. I certainly knew a lot of the information in general terms but the sheer volume and specificity is really astonishing"--ABC's Martha Raddatz.

"This massive leak provides incredible detail and insight into the war in Afghanistan. Day by day, battle by battle, it is a tough look at the worst of the war"--NBC's Jim Miklaszewski.

"The avalanche of documents, most of them classified secret, shows how the United States has been losing the war in Afghanistan one day at a time"--CBS' David Martin.

Next day, CBS' Martin went on to give us the Pentagon jargon for the Afghanistan War during the six year period covered by the WikiLeaks.org documents--an "Economy of Force Operation, a euphemism meaning Not Enough Troops." During the period when the Pentagon diverted troops and technology to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, "the Taliban, taking advantage of sanctuaries in Pakistan and corruption in the Afghan government, made a comeback."

Many of the talking heads in Craw's video mash-up pooh-poohed this history as already heavily covered, well known and widely understood. The Pentagon correspondents were right to assume that the opposite is the case. The Tyndall Report chart (see Afghanistan Overtakes Iraq in the left-hand column) that compares coverage of the Iraq war with coverage of the fighting in Afghanistan reveals that it was not just the Pentagon, but the network nightly newscasts themselves, too, that diverted resources away from Afghanistan, turning a blind eye while the situation deteriorated.

This Pentagon trio found three repeated themes pervading the thousands of battlefield reports that comprised the bulk of the document dump. Each alone could cripple a counterinsurgency. In tandem, they doom it. First, as CBS' Martin mentioned, troop levels were insufficient to pacify and protect the population. NBC's Miklaszewski pointed out that US military commanders in the field "repeatedly complain about lack of resources." Second, there is no legitimate government in Kabul for the population to support: "corrupt and inefficient," CBS' Martin quoted from one document. "The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worse than the Taliban." Third, ABC' Raddatz found "horrifying detail" about the slaughter of civilians, including a botched rocket attack that targeted an al-Qaeda commander but killed seven children instead. The Delta Force commandos wrote a warning memo that no one should find out about their snafu.

While on assignment in Uganda for 60 Minutes, CBS' Lara Logan had this insight into the impact of dead civilians. Even though the document dump claimed that the Taliban kills ten times as many civilians as NATO forces, "it is more of an issue for United States forces to kill Afghan civilians than it is for the Taliban to do so."

Given all this evidence of a doomed counterinsurgency effort, NBC' Miklaszewski asked the White House and the Pentagon to explain why they thought they still had a chance of prevailing: "Since most of these documents were written, the President signed off on a new strategy," was their response. CBS' Martin put it this way: "The goal is to create an Afghan government, complete with army and police force, that can fend for itself against the Taliban. But before that can happen, US troops will have to drive the Taliban out of Kandahar for the second time. The United States is not likely to get a third chance in Afghanistan."

So Assange's scoop was given high marks for military relevance from correspondents at the Pentagon. What about political relevance? How did White House and Congressional correspondents assess WikiLeaks.org's contribution to the debate over the war?

From the White House right off the bat on Monday, CBS' Chip Reid heard that now-familiar yawn: "They are trying to make it sound like this is really nothing new." Reid was not buying: "I will tell you, they may be underestimating the problems here…If we are now going to bombarded with a long series of specific examples, that is going to make it more difficult for both the Afghan people and the American people to support the war." Tuesday, Reid pulled out historical polling data that shows popular opposition to the war in Afghanistan plummeting between 2003 and 2008. Support for the war now stands "at a mere 31%." The leaked documents "still threaten to turn public opinion against the war even more."

The House of Representatives does not agree with the electorate at large. Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed that "this is an unpopular war. It is losing support. There are real questions about whether it is winnable and how long the public will support them. These documents reinforce those doubts." Nevertheless Stephanopoulos assured ABC anchor Diane Sawyer that "this leak alone is not going to change the course of the vote" as Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama applied for another $33bn to pay to continue fighting. Sure enough, next day, ABC led with Jonathan Karl's coverage of the House vote to approve war funds: "For the most part it was Republicans who made the case for the Obama Administration's policy in Afghanistan and gave them the votes." He noted that in the last year, opposition to the war in Congress by House Democrats has more than tripled, from 32 votes to more than 100. Karl quoted the anti-war leader Rep Dennis Kucinich: "WikiLeaks' release of secret war documents gave us 92,000 reasons to end the war."

On the diplomatic front, too, the network nightly newscasts treated Assange's scoop as newsworthy. NBC's Andrea Mitchell covered the efforts of the State Department to reassure the government of Pakistan about the Pentagon's suspicions of "double dealing," the secret diversion of some of the $7.5bn in US military aid by its ISI spies to fund Taliban guerrillas. Those reassurances do "not mean that they do not reflect what Washington really thinks about Pakistan's shadowy spy agency." ABC's Raddatz pointed to a CIA analysis that estimated that 95% of all suicide bombers operating in Afghanistan were graduates of a pair of Pakistani madrassahs near Peshawar that were visited by Gen Hamid Gul, the former chief of ISI. NBC's Miklaszewski landed an interview with Gul: "I deny it vehemently, outrightly. I think it is mischievous. It is fictitious and it is fabricated." Well, at least he did not say Nothing New Here.

CBS anchor Katie Couric followed up with a question to White House correspondent Reid from a Twittering viewer: "Can Pakistan even be called a partner at this point?" Reid's answer was too cute by half. "Despite all those claims in the WikiLeaks documents, the White House says Yes." So Reid established that, yes, it is possible to call Pakistan a partner. Presumably, what the question was driving at was whether such a characterization has any underlying veracity. Reid passed on that straightforward answer.

So, the nightly newscasts had a unanimous thumbs up for Assange, right?

Not quite. The documents he provided were greeted as newsworthy. His political intervention in the debate over the war was treated as effective. There was no yawn. There was something new here. As an Afghanistan story, it had bona fides. As a media story, something did not smell right.

"Assange is clearly an advocate and opponent of the war," NBC's Mitchell pointed out. "It is a brave new world when journalists use sources like WikiLeaks." Disappointingly, Mitchell did not explain what she was driving at. CBS' Jeff Greenfield tried to put his finger on why WikiLeaks.org is so troubling. He quoted Assange's self-confessed agenda to seek "significant reforms in US and allied policies in Afghanistan" in order to make the observation that "traditional media outlets do not talk that way."

CBS' Greenfield argued that WikiLeaks is non-traditional in two ways. First, it is not a traditional gatekeeper, assessing the reliability of data before releasing it: "One person with a laptop can reach as far as the biggest newspaper or TV network. If that person wants to publish, it is published." Second, WikiLeaks.org is an "online site with no headquarters, no physical presence anywhere."

Of the two points, the latter is intriguing; the former is contradicted by the facts. Assange's very decision to use long-established gatekeepers--the Times/Guardian/Spiegel--refutes Greenfield's notion that publication by laptop has the reach of traditional media. Assange's decision to base his Website in no nation does make a difference. Jay Rosen at PressThink calls it the "World's First Stateless News Organization." Greenfield quoted the following putdown of WikiLeaks.org by Floyd Abrams, the longstanding First Amendment attorney: "It is not as if at least I have any information to suggest that they are highly trained in national security matters." Abrams, seemingly unintentionally, hit the nail on the head. WikiLeaks.org has no training in national security matters because it belongs to no nation that needs to be secure. It is untrained in national security because it is indifferent to it.

Ultimately, this was the problem the network nightly newscasts had with Assange and his scoop--not the quality of his information but his indifference to the security of this nation. The domestic debate between supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan can always be framed as a debate over what is in the best interest of the United States. Assange's intervention cannot be covered that way--nor can it be covered as an intervention on behalf of an ally nor of an adversary nor of Afghanistan itself. WikiLeaks.org exists outside of the category of making nations secure or insecure.

So, ABC's David Muir on Monday covered the anxiety of wired.com's Adrian Lamo as he communicated with Bradley Manning, the Iraq-based army private who is suspected of exfiltrating the data dump while humming Lady GaGa tunes. Lamo grew "increasingly alarmed, eventually turning him in" for fear that he was putting American soldiers' lives at risk. ABC's Raddatz, Wednesday, charged that Assange had not redacted the names of "numerous" Afghan informants cooperating with US occupation forces so those informants may now be at risk for retaliation. Raddatz had John McLaughlin, the onetime Acting Director of the CIA, characterize Assange: "Amateurs like WikiLeaks either do not care or have no idea how to protect sources and how to protect lives." Thursday, CBS' Martin led off his newscast with a condemnation by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman Mark Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He paraphrased them as accusing WikiLeaks.org of murder, although he failed to provide a soundbite to back up such an extreme charge. "They might already have the blood on their hands of some young soldier," was the closest he offered. "The battlefield consequences…are potentially severe and dangerous."

The fact that Martin overreported his story so uncharacteristically offers a hint about what really rattles the American news media about the independence of WikiLeaks.org. It is not its opposition to the US war effort in Afghanistan--but the site's baffled indifference to the entire notion of national security as a category.]]> Gulf Coast Oil Disaster Overstays its Welcome http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5141 Andrew Tyndall 2010-07-10T11:42:52-08:00 For years Tyndall Report has complained about the disdain with which the network nightly newscasts tend to treat the Environment beat. The two-decade trend of time devoted to environmental coverage since 1988 shows that even when Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his Inconvenient Truth in 2007 the category could not break out into headline-grabbing status. So it would churlish for me now to say enough already. BP's oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has attracted massive, unprecedented attention to the issues such as the reliance on fossil-fuel energy, the wisdom of deepwater offshore oil drilling and the ecological damage that can be caused by extractive industries.

Nevertheless. Enough already!

Tellingly, the previous annual high for environmental coverage on the nightly newscasts in Tyndall Report's 22-year database was 1989, the last time an American coastline was despoiled by pollution from a petroleum multinational. In that year the Exxon Valdez attracted an enormous 203 minutes of coverage. BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster has caused more pollution by an order of magnitude--and has attracted vaster amounts of coverage accordingly. In the three months since the broken well started gushing crude from the sea bed, it has attracted close to 20 hours of attention on the three weekday nightly newscasts (1,100 mins--ABC 306, CBS 370, NBC 423).

For a long time, the commitment of the network news divisions to this disaster was commendable. What was first of all an hellacious industrial accident that cost eleven lives turned into an ecological disaster. CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, for example, was tenacious in her investigation into BP's initial downplaying of the extent of the undersea gusher and the failures of its contingency planning. NBC's Tom Costello was clear and informative in his explanation of how drilling technology works.

All three networks dispatched teams of correspondents to report from the Gulf of Mexico and the Louisiana coastline. NBC's effort has been led by its environmental correspondent Anne Thompson (45 reports so far)--only NBC has a reporter dedicated to the green beat. Thompson has been backed up by two colleagues from NBC's Miami bureau, Mark Potter (21 reports) and Kerry Sanders (16 reports). CBS has relied on general reporters assigned to that region: Atlanta-based Mark Strassmann (38 reports) and Kelly Cobiella (18 reports) from Miami. ABC, too, has used a Miami-based correspondent, Jeffrey Kofman (22 reports), most often. In addition national general assignment reporter David Muir (12 reports) and Texas-based (UPDATE: my mistake, see comments--thanks Anonymous) Ryan Owens (12 reports) were flown in and a new face, Matt Gutman (22 reports) has been brought over from ABC Radio News--and Guttman definitely does not have a face for radio, as the saying goes.

The climax of the coverage of this disaster came when a political angle was added to this initial Gulf Coast focus. Just look at the week-by-week increase in attention (data are in minutes, stated as a three-network total) as the crisis became more political, as the debate mounted as to whether the federal government would be able to hold the multinational corporation accountable. The first five weeks of the story saw a gradual weekly increase (23 min to 71 to 56 to 62 to 81) through the middle of May.

For the next four weeks, from May 24th through June 18th, (154 min to 153 to 127 to 144) the story was a full-blown headline grabber: BP's sea-bed attempts to plug the gusher failed and President Barack Obama came under pressure to demonstrate that his administration had control of the crisis. That four-week period culminated in BP's CEO Tony Hayward testifying with stonewalling answers on Capitol Hill; the President making a primetime televised address to the nation; and BP agreeing to set up an independently-administered $20bn fund to compensate those whose livelihoods the oil slick had ruined.

At that point the drama of the power struggle around the disaster had played out. During those four weeks of peak coverage, more than 20% of all reports (42 out of 199) had an inside-the-Beltway angle, concerning either the White House or the Congress or federal regulators. Preceding that four-week period, the politics of the disaster was mentioned occasionally (12 reports out of 103); since the $20bn fund has been put in place, there has not been a single further report (0 out of 83) with a political angle.

When that political climax was reached the coverage had already been disproportionate, even excessive. Consider this comparison: the first nine weeks of the BP oil disaster attracted a cumulative 871 minutes of coverage; the first nine weeks of the Hurricane Katrina disaster attracted only marginally more, 903 minutes. As I have said, I personally tend to lobby the nightly newscasts to treat environmental stories with more seriousness than they do but I draw the line here. Poisoning coastal marshes and killing marine ecosystems and depriving fishing villages of their livelihoods and despoiling tourist resorts are all horrible. But it is an insult to the hundreds of dead and the thousands of displaced of the city of New Orleans to cover those two disasters as if they were of equal magnitude.

Drowning a city is more shocking and consequential by far.

Besides, the extreme coverage of this oil slick leaves the impression that the destruction of Louisiana's coastal wetlands is the fault of this lone disaster. The environmental depredation of the region and the erosion of its wetlands were well under way even before deepwater oil exploration began, often as a consequence of accident-free drilling. For all the complaints that arose from the region against BP for its pollution, the sporadic coverage of the local opposition to the Interior Department's moratorium on drilling demonstrated that the extractive industrialization of the Gulf of Mexico still attracts serious regional political support.

The most recent three weeks show the diminishing returns of the story (from 86 min to 80 to 63). The political aspect of the crisis has been defused. There have been few new hard news developments. Thompson's reports on NBC have tended to be incremental round-ups of the day's largely insignificant developments. Coverage has turned more and more to topics that would normally qualify as feature material to close a newscast rather than headline fare: on animals (8 reports) and tourism (10 reports). Before the headline fever broke three weeks ago, these soft news angles represented 14% of all coverage (41 reports out of 302); since then these angles have increased to 22% (18 out of 83).

CBS' Steve Hartman even managed to shoehorn a trip to the cabanas of the Florida Keys and a profile of a June beach bride into his Assignment America human interest coverage to illustrate BP's pollution. On the other hand, Hartman's profile of Olivia Bouler, the eleven-year-old ornithological illustrator was a keeper.

There comes a point where the local effects of the oil disaster become just that, a local news story, no longer of pressing concern to the national nightly newscasts. Why should the unemployment of a Louisiana oysterpacker be any more newsworthy, from a national perspective, than a laid-off California teacher or a long-term unemployed Michigan autoworker? Why should the empty beachfront bars of Pensacola attract more national attention than the casino recession on the Las Vegas Strip?

Granted, the damage to the marine ecosystem is a continuing and serious story of national importance--and sometimes when a New York based anchor travels down to the Gulf Coast an environmental lesson, for example by NBC's Brian Williams, is what we get. Mostly, latterly, the coverage has been about the human toll of this disaster: NBC's Williams on a shrimping family, CBS' Katie Couric on forlorn youth, ABC's Diane Sawyer on hymnsinging villagers. Frankly, in the national scheme of things, the dislocation in these sparsely populated coastal counties and parishes does not deserve such incessant attention--especially since BP has set aside $20bn to make them whole; especially since the disaster that befell next-door New Orleans was so much more calamitous.

The networks' assignment desks seemed trapped by their own past enthusiasm. Having committed maximum resources to covering the story when it was at crisis stage, regaining a sense of proportion now might seem like callous indifference. It is as if a fear of seeming fickle has clouded their news judgment. NBC has been the worst offender at overstaying its welcome: in the last three weeks since the crisis broke its fever pitch, NBC has sent almost as much time (101 min v ABC 51, CBS 77) on the oil story as its two rivals put together.

It reminds me of the spring of 2000, when a minor foreign policy story, with an interesting human interest angle, became a cause celebre because the national news media, having committed to its importance, could not let go until they had found resolution. The child custody case of Elian Gonzalez ended up logging an astonishing 503 minutes of coverage, the single biggest non-campaign story of that election year. I suppose we can expect to sit through a similar daily drumbeat of oil leak coverage all through the summer until that hole is finally plugged.

These excesses of overenthusiasm do not come without a price in the zero-sum journalistic world of the network nightly newscasts, with their fixed 19-minute newsholes. As a consequence of so much time being spent in the Gulf of Mexico, several major news stories have been escaped the scrutiny they deserved during the past twelve weeks. In particular, the fatal flotilla protest against the blockade of the Gaza Strip (30 mins) and the transfer of command from Gen Stanley McChrystal (41 mins) to Gen David Petraeus (11 mins) in Afghanistan both receives short shrift overseas. In the domestic economy, the debate over regulation of high finance (45 mins) and over extension of unemployment benefits (29 mins) would both have received more attention in normal times. In politics, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan (46 mins) felt the squeeze.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is indeed a major news story. The problem for the networks is that they have confused those angles that are of pressing national concern with the regional consequences that properly belong to the news crews of their local affiliates. The big national environmental questions concern the future of offshore drilling, federal regulation of Big Oil, holding BP accountable, the restoration of the marine and wetlands ecosystems of the Mississippi Delta and the feasibility of transforming the national economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Over the past three years, NBC, following the Green is Universal mandate of its parent corporation--General Electric manufactures such carbon-free energy technologies as wind, hydroelectric and nuclear--has treated such issues as more newsworthy (504 min on the Environment beat v ABC 290, CBS 381). All three networks are in danger of muddying those important national public policy questions with endless local human interest features on docked shrimp boats and tar-ball strewn beaches.

Enough already! Leave the slimed pelicans and those precious turtle eggs to local news at 6pm.]]> http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5140 Andrew Tyndall 2010-07-06T06:01:37-08:00