Current Media War Coverage Is Increasingly Less Objective
The Editorial Board

As students at a liberal arts college, our concepts of free speech and censorship can be somewhat limited. When it comes to life at Pomona, we might engage in a theoretical argument about Milton or Locke's ideas regarding free speech or we might chat over lunch about whether misogynist rap lyrics should be censored or not. Rarely, however, does Pomona require us to directly defend those concepts. Now that we've experienced war, however, those of us who never previously questioned the uniquely American ideals of free speech are being forced to reconsider where we stand on the issue. Why? Because of the frightening uncertainty about the accuracy of the war coverage we listen to, watch, or read. The U.S. Government has a pattern of restricting the media more heavily during times of war, sometimes to the point where reporters merely repeati what is handed to them by military officials. We rely so heavily on the news for information that we can not afford to sit by and not question what we see.

News media is such a respected American institution that it is remarkably easy to take what is being reported as fact. Most audiences are savvy enough to distinguish between "good" news and "bad" news: upon arriving in Los Angeles, many Pomona students are quick to point out the ridiculousness of some Los Angeles news broadcasts that have special reports every time it rains for more than 20 minutes. However, CNN and the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, etc. are what most of us growing up thought of as reliable sources of news. Once we get to college and our analytical skills become more sophisticated, we realize that CNN probably isn't 100 percent objective. With the Left saying that the media has a Conservative bias, and Conservatives claiming that the media actually has a liberal bias, and the Left coming back and saying that the reason Conservatives proclaim a liberal bias is to mask the real Conservative bias-well, you don't know who you should believe. This is postmodernism at its best and worst: while we distrust the modernist notion of the media telling us they are presenting us the "truth," we are left with no idea of how to decipher what we read in order to understand what is truly happening.

It is with this mentality that we consider the media coverage of the war and try to make sense of the information we are receiving. One of the strangest contradictions being exhibited in the press concerns anti-war protestors. We see self-proclaimed "patriotic" individuals who stress that regardless of the ways and means it is achieved, America has a moral responsibility to oust Saddam Hussein in order to ensure that Iraq is able to enjoy freedom of speech. However, some of these very same people are denouncing war protestors for voicing their opinions, saying that it is certainly unpatriotic and possibly traitorous for any American to not support President Bush now that war is underway. Why aren't any reporters or anchors commenting on this? Perhaps it's because lately, journalists are being fired merely for expressing their opinions: most recently, Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Arnett was fired for offering his opinion about the war. NBC fired Arnett because he gave an interview to an Iraqi television station in which he said: "The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan." NBC's problem with this statement was that it was given without their permission. NBC also objected because they thought Arnett presented his opinion as fact. The network claims that their main motivation for firing Arnett, however, was because of the tremendous pressure they received from thousands of viewer e-mails and phone calls.

Arnett later apologized for his remarks, but also stated: "I said over the weekend what we all know about this war." The most frightening part of this story is that Arnett did not even say anything radically controversial-he simply stated what anyone following the news would have been able to deduce: that despite all the hype, the government's "shock-and-awe" campaign failed to do just that. What would have happened to Arnett had he said something actually extreme, such as that Bush was wrong to enter into this war without the United Nations' approval?

There are examples as well, such as the negative coverage that all war protests (peaceful or not) have been receiving, or the fact that a recent study revealed that 76 percent of all on-camera network sources were current or former government officials-not exactly a way to ensure objectivity. We are living in scary world when people are getting fired from a supposedly unbiased news media for disagreeing with the government. This should make us question how much we can trust the information we are reading. There's no easy solution, no one paper we can trust to be free from bias. By reading enough different newspapers, and looking as sites such as the website of the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting organization (www.fair.org) or Indymedia.org (which reports on news media and covers events that get little coverage), we can at least gain a more complete picture of what events are happening in the world. In turn, we can all be more informed before we decide what to protest and what to support.