The Media Corrects Itself
Newspaper Admits to Iraqi Bias
By Daniel Muniz

My hometown of San Antonio Texas is often called Military City USA. Although the city once boasted five military installations before the base closures, it still has an enormous military presence. In addition, many former servicemen seek San Antonio as a place for retirement. The city is also noted for being a gold mine for military recruiters because it typically has one of the highest enlistments into the service above and beyond any other metropolitan area even when there are declines elsewhere.

In fact, just about every San Antonio neighborhood I have ever lived in, there was always a neighbor that lived next door or across the street or around the corner who was either on active duty, a reservist, or had retired (my neighbor across the street of my new home recently retired as a drill sergeant for the army) from the service.

The same goes for even the numerous apartment complexes I have resided in (I once lived directly above an army recruiter and next door to an Air Force drill instructor whose wife was also in the Air Force).

But it is also of no surprise that the local newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, doesn’t go out of its way to report hardly any of the many positive stories about the war in Iraq or at least offer a reasonable perspective about military issues. Like many other media outlets across the country, they seem to enjoy printing all the carnage and bloodshed without giving much credence to the success and the improvements already happening in Iraq.

It is a shame that the local paper behaves in this fashion given the background and heritage of a city like San Antonio. Bob Richter, the Express-News public editor, justifies it this way:

“This newspaper recognizes the vital, historic role of the military in San Antonio, yet it neither kowtows to the brass and the camp followers nor does it go out of its way to ding them.”
 

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But in a rare streak of honesty, Richter admitted that they got it wrong. He explains:

“Sometimes the critics are right, and the Express-News should acknowledge that when pressed for an answer. We demand the same of the people we cover. We should be as forthcoming.

On June 9, the day after al-Qaida henchman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Iraq, the Express-News headline read:

Terrorist's killing won't cure Iraq

Those who didn't read the accompanying story might reasonably assume it would mirror the bad news suggested by the headline.”

Not only did the editor admit that a mistake was made, he also explained how it happened:

"We wrote the headline mindful of the fact that the news of al-Zarqawi's demise would be a little more than 24 hours old by the time readers received their papers, and we did not want to simply restate what most of them already knew," said Executive News Editor Paul Hill, the headline writers' supervisor.

"Instead, we wanted to give them a fresh angle to the story and felt that focusing on the impact al-Zarqawi's death might have on the insurgency would meet that objective."

However, Editor Robert Rivard, who bore the brunt of accusations about the headline, didn't pussyfoot or mince words, noting:

"The readers, of course, are right and we're wrong, and we need to change what we're doing."

That is quite a stunning revelation. The biggest criticisms that supporters of the war have heaped on the press is that every time there is a victory or a success, the media tends to spin the message so that the opposite meaning gets relayed instead of presenting the facts. That is, the press ends up telling you what to think instead of just reporting the news as in the case of the bogus headline that is mentioned here.

And there was no “fresh angle” in the Zarqawi death other than it being a tremendous accomplishment for our military and for the beleaguered Iraqi people. Downplaying the significance of it in the headline trivializes the basis of the actual story. Furthermore, the same paper does not ever use the same logic the other way around. That is, whenever there is carnage to report, they do not attach a positive sounding headline to it for a “fresh angle” on the story. If they did, every leftists and anti-war activists would scream about it.

But overall, that front page headline was as misleading as it was blatantly deliberate. The editors recognized that and kudos to them for admitting it.

This admission does not purge the editors of their past wrongdoings. I have oftentimes seen them clamoring about how objective and impartial they are while in the next paragraph of the very same article they say the ugliest and nastiest things about people who are outside of their ideological mindset.

However this acknowledgement does give them substantially more credibility in my book. The press still wants the blood and guts (like publicizing a few people eaten by alligators instead of the thousands who are killed and maimed by deer crossing the highways) that captures people’s attention but at least they are willing to correct things that go over the top.

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