POLITICS: CBS News Was Guilty of Propagandizing During the Iraq War

Let's start by defining news:

News is the act of conveying information that has a cultural relevance and/or shared public interest.  The information conveyed in this manner, according to Dean Howard Schneider of the Stony Brook News Literacy department must be subject to some manner of journalistic vetting.

The vetting contains three sub-sections, which will be the crux of my argument going forward:  This information must be verified; it must be conveyed independently and the person or organization must be held accountable for the information they promulgate in this manner.  This is the criterion furthered by the News Literacy department at the SUNY: Stony Brook.

Furthermore, when news isn't news... that is to say, when information is conveyed in a manner that suggests news, gives the appearance of news and is in the public interest in a similar manner to news, but that news fails to meet the above criteria, then that information is propaganda.

Please watch the following video before I expand, it was produced in all likelihood in 2004:



Obviously this is news, or at least it’s meant to be news: it seeks to inform, was originally produced by professional journalists on the ground in Iraq and was aired by a well-known and often renowned news company: CBS News. However, I think it falls well short of the journalistic process and is unworthy of the CBS brand.

First, it is not properly vetted and therefore fails the “verification” requirement. I'm well aware that an argument could be made that it is easy to, with the benefit of hindsight, know that the insurgency was not “all but over” as the video claimed at the top, however, this video relies almost exclusively on unnamed “U.S. Commanders” and “Iraqi Officials,” all of whom paint the rosiest of pictures with regards to the war. The only two named in the sources in the piece are U.S. Marine Christopher Meyers and U.S. Naval Surgeon Dr. Richard Jadick, neither of whom are identified by rank, nor is whether or in what capacity their personal involvement with the anti-insurgency was,  though we can infer their roles.

How interesting that Mr. Meyers describes how RPG Gunners have “just hammer[ed] away at [the U.S.] tanks and instead of addressing the difficulties the American soldiers are facing, Ms. Palmer continues to jingoistically trumpet how hard the insurgents are being hit. Further, when Dr. Jadick says casualties were “better than we thought,” the reporter again glosses over how the expectation was “a huge amount of casualties” “in an urban environment,” especially now knowing how those huge numbers of casualties were just around the corner, it seems Ms. Palmer could have afforded to do her job and actually question whether or not things were as hunky dory as the “Iraqi officials” stated.

Secondly, this story violates the tenet of “independence.” CBS News didn’t have a vested interest in the Iraq War per se, but the reporter has a clear pro-war bias. Note how she opens the piece: the Fallujah offensive is described not as a solemn event or an unfortunate battle in the midst of a larger and serious objective but “a devastating display of American firepower.” Rambo would've blushed at that sort of "cowboy-up," gung-ho description. Moreover, the reporter uses the phrase “mop up” or “mopping up” multiple times in furtherance of the narrative that the Fallujah offensive and by extension the Iraq War is going swimmingly. Given how the reporter over-relies on unnamed sources claims that the offensive was a success and downplaying every instance of American casualties or sacrifice, I believe the piece fails the test of independence.

Finally, and in fairness, we only know this after the fact, this violates the tenet of accountability. Almost everything in this piece turned out to be factually wrong and while I know there is a provisional truth to the news that states things could have been going very well when this piece was first produced, I find it very difficult to believe that the Fallujah offensive, one of the most devastating to American soldiers in the whole Iraq War really started out this well. Given that around the time of this piece Vice President Cheney said the insurgency was in it “last throes” there was clearly a narrative being promulgated that the reporter bought into wholly. I think it’s telling that this video was put up on Youtube not by CBS News but by Maxx64, an everyday user.

CBS should be ashamed of this piece, and for all I know, they are. However, no correction, retraction or other apology has made its way from any of the major media outlets for the abdication of their journalistic responsibility to the U.S. people during the Iraq War. If they did, is was quiet enough that a voracious news consumer such as myself was able to miss it.

Everyone can be guilty of getting caught up on a nationalist fervor following an event as horrifying as 9/11, so the News Media can be forgiven for some measure of going along with the government in a show of national unity.  But this was, at the earliest, 30 full months after 9/11 and not a single one of the stated reasons for the Iraq War ever came to fruition (and before you say it, deposing Sadam Hussein was not, until much later, trumpeted as the objective of this war), the fact that our news media didn't have the temerity to start REALLY questioning this war until AFTER it had already become unpopular is a scary portend of things to come.

Let me end by saying that this was not limited to this piece or CBS News, if anyone is aware of any similar abdications on the part of the news media during the war, please send them my way.   This isn't about pro-war or anti-war, this is about baseline skepticism and journalistic practice being tossed aside at the highest level... and that's beyond unacceptable.