Anti-War Camp Silenced by Media
- Zeina Khodr

Anti-war movements have complained that they have been largely ignored and at times prevented from airing anti-war advertisements on broadcast media.

The only thing the movement could have done to stop the war (against Iraq) is to have mobilised an even greater opposition. But one of the reasons that mobilising in the United States is so difficult is that our spokespersons are marginalised from the mainstream media,” Mike Zmolek of the National Network to End the War Against Iraq told Al Jazeera.

study conducted in March by the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that network newscasts, dominated by current and former American officials, largely exclude Americans who are sceptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq.

FAIR examined the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The study began one week before and ended one week after US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 5 February presentation at the United Nations, a time that saw particularly intense debate about war against Iraq on the national and international level.

More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the US guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official US sources expressed scepticism or opposition to the war,” FAIR’s report said.

Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented.”

According to Robert Jensen of the School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, the US news media were late to understand the size and commitment of the anti-war movement.

But they did eventually begin to cover the groups when they were too big to ignore. They do cover protests and rallies. But the problem is that there is little coverage of the reasons for opposition,” Jensen told Jazeera.

”Journalists pay little attention to the arguments of demonstrators, which leaves the impression that anti-war activists like to shout in the street but haven’t developed an analysis deeper than the slogans on placards.”

Then what drives these anti-war activists? “Overall, I think the main motivation is the understanding that war is abominable, that innocent people die and that is an outrage to justice,” Zmolek explained.

“The strength of our movement is the strong ethical position against war, against indiscriminate killing of civilians and against killing that takes place on the battlefield when diplomacy is still an option.”

The online advocacy group TrueMajority.org argued that the “mainstream media, especially television, are not giving anything like equal coverage to rational arguments against attacking Iraq.”

“The group’s ads have been rejected because stations said they preferred to address the issue through the news departments or did not want to air graphic images,” the spokesman argued.

Television coverage, which always prefers to focus on compelling images rather than compelling analyses, is far worse than that of newspapers, but all the mainstream commercial news media are failing to do truly independent reporting and analysis, Jensen said.

Like in most countries, the news media in the United States buy into conceptions of patriotism and nationalism during wartime.

"The US military’s system of allowing reporters to be “embedded” with units has allowed journalists to report from the field, but under the watchful eye of military commanders. The result of all this is inadequate information for the public."