One of the key questions as the saga of grieving mother and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan camps out near President George Bush’s vacation Mecca continues is the accuracy of media coverage.
Some on the left say the press needs to report more. Some on the right says the press has reported too much.
However, in a piece in the Rocky Mountain News, Dave Kopel argues that the press has not reported enough because he contends it has in effect censored some of her tougher words and more inflammatory words that could lose her some support.
What’s particularly interesting about Kopel’s argument is that he notes that Sheehan wants to use tough language to shake people up and mobilize them…but the press, he suggests, is essentially acting as a P.R buffer:
Cindy Sheehan claims the media are “a propaganda tool for the government.” A New York Post editorial (Aug. 16) argued that Sheehan’s statement was self-evidently false, given the overwhelming and almost exclusively positive media attention paid to her in the last several weeks. But in a broader sense, Sheehan has a point: Almost all the news stories and columns in Denver dailies, like the vast majority of the rest of the mainstream media, have failed to inform their readers about what Sheehan really thinks.
He then goes into quite a bit of detail:
In other words, Sheehan’s use of inflammatory rhetoric is an important part of her communication strategy. Yet even as the mainstream media has fawned over her campout, it has neutered her message, refusing to print her statements which are intended to get people off the fence.
For example, on Aug. 16, Sheehan held a media conference call during which she declared “The person who killed my son, I have no animosity for that person at all.” Yet her statement was reported only in the National Review Online weblog. In an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS News, she explained that the foreigners who have to come to Iraq to battle the U.S. military are “freedom fighters.” (Video at the anti-war Web site dc.indymedia. org/usermedia/video/2/cindyon bus.mov). Conversely, she described last January’s vote in Iraq as a “sham election,” in her Tuesday entry on her weblog on Michael Moore’s Web site (http:// michaelmoore.com/mustread/ index.php?id=465).
Sheehan hopes that her strong words will get people off the fence, yet the mainstream media fails to report them. And until Friday’s profile in the Rocky Mountain News, the only Denver daily articles to quote Sheehan’s provocative words at even modest length were editorial page columns in the News – two by Mike Rosen and one by George Will, for a grand total of four paragraphs’ worth of quotes. The Denver Post continues to shield its readers almost completely from Sheehan’s fiery language and radical policy beliefs, as did a 25-paragraph profile of Sheehan in Friday’s News.
Indeed, context matters. And you’d think that both sides would be clamoring now for papers to completely report what she says due to their agendas: the left would want her to get her point across (because they agree with her and think it will trigger support); the right would want her to get her point across (because they think it’d lose her support). Instead you see the left seeking lots of press coverage using a tightly controlled image and some on the right angry over the press coverage she’s getting.
Kopel’s point is a good one: why not report in MORE detail and let thinking people decide for themselves. The imagery (grieving mother) won’t change. Nor will the boomerang effect that seems to be there of some on the right vilifying her and even gloating over her divorce. Also, Sheehan would want that more extensive coverage.
Why does the press do this? Part of the reason is time constraints (broadcast). Part of it is space constraints (shrinking “news hole”). But some of it is the fact that by leaving this out it’s a much “cleaner” story and the focus is just on the “high concept” portions of the story: a grieving mother standing out there in Crawford, TX, demanding to see a President who is not just vacationing but apparently took a vacation from his vacation. The counter demonstrators showing up. (Note to counter demonstrators: it is not news that you support George Bush and the war. It gets some pro forma stories but it really is not news in the sense of it being something unusual or NEW).
All of this imagery and symbolism is easy to set up in headlines, news photos, short broadcast pieces. Going into great detail about what she feels in detail is harder to do. Plus, there MAY be a feeling (speculation here) on the part of some reporters that the other stuff complicates the story and reduces its impact as a dramatic story.
It’s doubtful that editors and reporters are saying: “Let’s protect Cindy Sheehan from losing some support!” It’s more a reflection of poor contextual reporting — something you think both sides would be demanding on this story since they each see it’s to their benefit.
You can see how all of this plays out and the strong imagery Ms. Sheehan has consolidated in Frank Rich’s column “The Vietnamization of Bush’s Vacation” in the New York Times:
It’s Casey Sheehan’s mother, not those haggling in Baghdad’s Green Zone, who really changed the landscape in the war this month. Not because of her bumper-sticker politics or the slick left-wing political operatives who have turned her into a circus, but because the original, stubborn fact of her grief brought back the dead the administration had tried for so long to lock out of sight. With a shove from Pat Robertson, her 15 minutes are now up, but even Mr. Robertson’s antics revealed buyer’s remorse about Iraq; his stated motivation for taking out Hugo Chávez by assassination was to avoid “another $200 billion war” to remove a dictator.
In the wake of Ms. Sheehan’s protest, the facts on the ground in America have changed almost everywhere. The president, for one, has been forced to make what for him is the ultimate sacrifice: jettisoning chunks of vacation to defend the war in any bunker he can find in Utah or Idaho. In the first speech of this offensive, he even felt compelled to take the uncharacteristic step of citing the number of American dead in public (though the number was already out of date by at least five casualties by day’s end). For the second, the White House recruited its own mom, Tammy Pruett, for the president to showcase as an antidote to Ms. Sheehan. But in a reversion to the president’s hide-the-fallen habit, the chosen mother was not one who had lost a child in Iraq.
So the imagery becomes grieving mother/activist versus President/defensive/bunker. Accurate? People will differ. Kopel writes:
In an Aug. 11 blog conference call, Sheehan stated, “Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.” Even if one does not entirely agree, the last several weeks do show that that the mainstream media sometimes mislead the public by refusing to print statements that sharply challenge the status quo.
The status quo in a story like this is basically the equivalent of “type casting.” Her more detailed comments could complicate the story line that emerges with a life of its own, nuances and context often be damned. And people on both sides will argue over whether that, in itself, is good or bad…
MORE READING ON THIS DEVELOPING STORY:
Anti-war protest draws other side to Texas
Protestors, Bush supporters stage dueling rallies at Crawford
Crawford endures dueling rallies
Bush-baiter Cindy to widen campaign
Opposing war camps mirror each other
Brad Blog (broadcasting from Crawford) photo essay
Stacy Taylor in Crawford (San Diego Air America station host)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.