Good News, Bad News

American Demographics, July 1, 2003

Byline: Matthew Grimm

In 1968, John Wayne put out a movie called The Green Berets. In 141 time/space-defying minutes, this motion picture's unquestioning, Pollyanna view of America was oblivious to what was going on at the time. Even as grizzly images of our military adventures appeared nightly on television, The Duke offered something from another Hollywood, one of his old war pictures or westerns in which, even in the face of savage conditions, people remained clean-shaven, clean-spoken, clean-shirted and perky. The plotline: Wayne and his Boy Scout commandos prove to a skeptical reporter the ultimate goodness of the United States' war in Vietnam.

The movie, made with a script assist from the Pentagon, highlights the chasm that always seems to exist between reality and "the official story." Today, Green Berets is considered a joke, a propagandistic dinosaur made so because of its gross juxtaposition to the groundbreaking work of the Fourth Estate it sought to subvert. We tend to look warily on propaganda because, in the rare instances where it comes to light, it belies our society's fundamental tenet of a free market of ideas. And if that seems to fly in the face of the hyperbolic ratings boosts the three 24/7 dedicated news networks garnered for their sanitized coverage of the recent war, it may emerge evidentially in an expanding media menu, notably in a conspicuous leakage of American Web surfers to overseas news organizations.

Much was made this spring of the "news war" between Fox News, MSNBC and CNN and the resulting viewership bonanza. But on closer examination of where and how Americans got their news during Gulf War II, we see some curious traffic patterns toward the Web sites of such outlets as the BBC, The Guardian and al-Jazeera.

In March, the month the war began, cnn.com drew 26.3 million unique viewers and msnbc.com drew 24.3 million - up 23 percent and 24 percent, respectively, over February. Newspaper sites saw upticks as well; The New York Times' site topped all with 9.6 million unique visitors, a 14 percent jump (all per New York-based Web tracker Nielsen//NetRatings). But the biggest jumps among American audiences were made by the BBC (up 158 percent, to 5.3 million); Reuters (up 72 percent, to 2.1 million); and al-Jazeera, the controversial Qatar-based news network founded by Asian ex-Beeb-ers, which bolted to a million unique viewers (technically a 1,208 percent jump, but that's starting from nothing), in spite of having its initial English-language site hacked and shuttered, most likely by the National Security Agency.

Obviously, we should expect proportionate increases in users of Web news media, given that the online population is still growing in the U.S. The Web and its cornucopia of news voices - alternate news sites, article clearinghouses, bloggers - have steadily eroded the reach of traditional media, particularly with the younger generation. A survey by the Newspaper Association of America found that daily newspaper readership declined by 9 percent from 1997 to 2000 among 18- to 24-year-olds, by 8 percent among 25- to 34-year-olds and by 6 percent for the 35-to-49 cohort. Viewership of local TV news declined 8 percent, 8 percent and 9 percent among the respective groups, while the number of visitors to Internet news sites jumped 16 percent, 15 percent and 12 percent. The youngest group's usage figure for Internet news sites (23 percent) nearly matched its rate for newspaper readership (24 percent).

Beyond tech access, something else is driving Americans to sample different flavors of news: the sterile groupthink and homogeneity of our own Big Media. Even as of February, though a majority of Americans thought war an improper course without U.N. sanction, precious few outlets among major U.S. networks or newspapers bothered to break down the numbers, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "At a time when 61 percent of U.S. respondents were telling pollsters that more time was needed for diplomacy and inspections, only 6 percent of U.S. sources on the four networks were skeptics regarding the need for war," FAIR reported in its study of networks' on-air "expert sources."

The major media fully ignored gangbuster stories reported exhaustively overseas. Among them were: (1) a manifesto that prescribed the invasion of Iraq and pacification of the Mideast penned in 1998 by a think tank whose board included a raft of current administration hawks; (2) the use of retreaded, outdated and "cooked" information in Colin Powell's case for war presented to the United Nations' Security Council; (3) the U.S. bugging and hacking communications of Security Council delegates; (4) astonishingly vocal cadres of American intelligence officers saying the administration was using only select tidbits of information that supported its actions, ignoring voluminous data that didn't; and (5) a defecting Iraqi general who said Hussein had destroyed all unconventional weapons in the early 1990s - information that seems to be sadly telling in the war's aftermath.