Tony Schinella, who …

Tony Schinella, who has a blog called Politizine, called me on an error I made on February 24th. I said,

Did you hear a story about Iraqi-Americans petitioning the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein?

Yeah, neither did I. Wonder why.

The link points to a item in the Detroit News that reported on an event organized by the Iraqi Forum for Democracy in which Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was the guest speaker. The members of this forum were urging him to topple Saddam Hussein, in response to all the anti-war protests.

Tony said, in response to me, “Yeah, I did, FoxNews, MSNBC, and CSPAN were live with Wolfowitz in the town hall meeting promoting the idea.” So apparently this meeting, or some other meeting with a similar tone, did get covered by some of the cable networks. But let’s look at the coverage for a second.

• Fox’s coverage doesn’t surprise me. “Fair and balanced” means showing both sides of the issue and they cover both the anti-war and pro-liberation crowds in a more balanced fashion than anybody.
• Good to see MSNBC covering all angles, although their ratings are pretty much in the basement.
• CSPAN covers everything if it’s political and especially if it involves a high-level cabinet position.

The only real surprise for me here is the MSNBC coverage. Good to see, but virtually inconsequential. However, conspicuous by their absence were CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. A search for any mention of “Iraqi Forum for Democracy” and “Wolfowitz” on Google News did not reveal coverage by any of those networks, at least on their web sites. There is still the possibility that Peter Jennings gave it a few seconds of air time, but the point was, and still is, that the networks give far, far more press to anti-war views than those who believe a war is necessary. (The Media Research Center has been chronicling many instances of this bias lately, especially with regards to ABC News.) Look what it took to get MSNBC to cover this unique pro-liberation angle; a personal visit by a top cabinet member. Would they have covered this event if, instead of inviting Wolfowitz, the Iraqi Forum for Democracy had just staged an anti-Saddam protest? I think a safe bet would be “No”. And even with Wolfowitz’s presence, the other networks didn’t find it worthy of mention.

In fact, with all the attacks on Fox News that they’re just shills for the Republicans, it’s interesting to note that almost all of the other networks that consider themselves balanced didn’t bother covering this. Fox covers all angles, and they’re called “biased”, while the other networks ignore or minimize conservatives and they call themselves “fair”.

So yes, my personal experience wasn’t enough when determining whether or not the networks were biased in coverage of this issue. But given more information, the picture doesn’t look better. It looks worse.

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