MEDIA-U.S.: Islamic World Dominated 2002 Television News Coverage

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 3 2003 (IPS) - So far as U.S. television network news is concerned, 2002 marked the ”Year of the Islamic World,” according to annual statistics compiled by the authoritative Tyndall Report which released them Thursday.

So far as U.S. television network news is concerned, 2002 marked the ”Year of the Islamic World,” according to annual statistics compiled by the authoritative Tyndall Report which released them Thursday.

Leading the list of the 20 top stories on the network news in 2002 were the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq, the aftermath of the Sep. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon and the subsequent U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, and the general war on terrorism, including the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

Together, those stories accounted for about 60 percent of the 5,622 minutes the three network news programmes devoted to the top 20 stories last year, according to the report.

Each of the three major networks – American Broadcasting Corp (ABC), National Broadcasting Corp (NBC), and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) – devotes about 22 minutes each evening to national and international news.

Polls show that most of the U.S. public relies primarily on television, as opposed to newspapers, magazines, or radio, for most information about international affairs.

In recent years, network news has lost ground to cable news, such as Cable News Network and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel which, according to another Tyndall report tends to be more right-wing in political orientation and far more opinionated in its presentation.

Still, network news represents an important benchmark for determining how the U.S. public sees the rest of the world.

Like the end of 2001 when the network coverage was overwhelmed by the Sep. 11 attacks and their global repercussions, 2002 was one of the rare periods since the 1991 Gulf War that international news dominated network news coverage.

In 2000, for example, only three major international news stories, aside from the Sydney Olympic Games, made it into the top 20 stories.

The Elian Gonzalez custody dispute between his U.S. and Cuban families, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the suicide bomb against the USS Cole near Yemen, combined for a total of less than 1,000 minutes out of a total of 5,560 consumed by the top 20 stories that year, or well under 20 percent.

The news’ international focus was reflected as well in the percentage of airtime given last year to correspondents reporting from abroad, 2,100 minutes, or almost 40 percent of the total. In 2000, the figure was about half of that total.

The international focus clearly aided the administration of President George W Bush. It shoved to the margins precisely those stories and issues, such as health care, the environment, education, and perhaps most potent, corporate abuse, mismanagement and fraud, on which Democrats were counting to give them a lift going into the November mid-term elections.

Thus, Enron Corp’s collapse, which ranked number five among the top 20 stories in total minutes, claimed 400 minutes, most of them at the beginning of 2002 immediately after the corporation went into bankruptcy.

The entire issue of corporate malfeasance totalled 512 minutes during the year, or slightly less than 10 percent of total coverage.

The stock market bubble and related stories accounted for an additional 279 minutes, putting the category of ”economy, finance, and business” into second place behind ”terrorism” among the 15 top issues covered by the networks in 2002.

But the number of minutes devoted to the economy was only slightly more than in 2000, while the time claimed by ”terrorism” rose seven-fold compared to 2000.

The Tyndall report also found that the time devoted to ”wars and armed conflicts” in 2002 was twice that given the issue in 2000, reinforcing the image of the world as far more violent than just two years ago.

With a total of 996 minutes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict topped the other 19 stories. Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was named "the most newsworthy man of the year,” claiming more attention than Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The aftermath of the Sep 11 attacks and of the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan ranked second and third, followed by Iraq, which claimed 428 minutes through 2002. That total does not include U.N. weapons inspections which claimed 325 minutes and the number seven ranking on its own, increasing total coverage to some 750 minutes, right behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After the Enron, sniper and inspection stories, the next biggest include the stock-market bubble, the Catholic paedophile priests scandal, and ”domestic terrorism preparedness” (not including airline security) at number 10.

The next 10 are a mix but remain dominated by the war on terrorism, for instance the manhunt for al-Qaeda suspects, which ranked number 11, and followed by news ranging from the manhunt for bin Laden specifically and the ”global effort” in the war on terrorism.

Two other international stories ranked 16 and 17, respectively. The abduction and murder of ‘Wall Street Journal’ reporter Daniel Perle in Pakistan received 112 minutes, three more than the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan.

”It is kind of emblematic of how television news likes to personalise and Americanise stories by devoting more time to one person, an American, as a victim of terrorism over a story that could potentially result in a nuclear war and the deaths of millions of people” said Jim Naureckas, an analyst at the media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

The only environment-oriented story that made it into the top 20 was the wild fires that ravaged parts of the western United States last summer. It was ranked 11. The total number of minutes devoted to environmental stories came to only 236 for the year, compared to 617 minutes previously.

Despite the U.S. media’s focus on wars and conflicts last year, their kind of coverage left out key stories, according to groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has just put out a list of the 10 humanitarian disasters "undercovered by the U.S. media" in 2002.

These stories included a man-made famine in Angola, civil wars in Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia, and a dramatic intensification of the civil war in Colombia. All of these brought a very high toll in infant mortality.

"These stories must be told," said Nicolas de Torrente, director of MSF-USA. "In MSF’s experience, silence is the bet ally of violence, impunity, and neglect.

"Media attention to dire crises can have a tremendous impact on mobilising the resolve needed to bring solutions. But for most Americans, it is as thought these vast human catastrophes do not exist,” he added.

The marginalisation of issues such as the environment, education and health care, combined with the domination of terrorism and warfare in the news, may also have contributed to a loss of attention to women.

While the Tyndall report found that former Attorney General Janet Reno was deemed the ”most newsworthy woman of the year” in 2000 for her role in the Elian affair, the prize for 2002 went to Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children.

She received 58 minutes of coverage, a little over half of the amount of time devoted to coverage of the India-Pakistan standoff.