Are Papers Ready To Cover War At Home?

Newspapers are gearing up to cover the probable U.S. war against Iraq -- but are they ready for the war at home that would likely result? Right now, it's impossible to say, based on coverage of the surprisingly strong turnouts for protest marches Oct. 26 in Washington and San Francisco.

The New York Times, for example, seemed to underplay its coverage of the march in the nation's capital -- then scrambled to reverse its judgment. The Boston Globe, meanwhile, might have overplayed coverage of that rally, one of the paper's editors tells E&P.

"The media is generally slow to pick up on citizen actions like that, but there's a growing awareness in newsrooms that there's something going on out there," says Peter Hart, media analyst for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Sara Flounders, co-director at International Answer (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which helped organize the rallies, says many papers ignored previous demonstrations until the Oct. 26 ones got too large to dismiss. (By police estimates, the Washington rally drew 100,000, making it the biggest antiwar march there since the Vietnam war, and the San Francisco rally drew about half that number.) Flounders adds that papers may cover rallies for a day, but write little about ongoing antiwar actions even as they constantly publicize the Bush administration's war plans.

But Roger Aronoff, a media analyst for Accuracy In Media, thinks the pendulum has swung too far at some papers. He calls The Washington Post's coverage of the Oct. 26 demonstration, for example, "too sympathetic" and says it "completely ignored who the leaders of the rally were." These leaders, according to Aronoff, included "hardcore Marxists" and "supporters of terrorist groups."

Reflecting the national split on this issue, The New York Times, over a four-day period, infuriated observers on both the pro- and antiwar sides. The day after the march, the Times ran a relatively short piece noting that the "thousands" of protesters in Washington comprised a smaller total than organizers had hoped for. Since the organizers had only taken out a permit for 20,000, this was, of course, quite false. Three days later, as if to make amends, the paper ran a second, longer story noting that the huge turnout "startled even organizers."

How did such different accounts of the same rally get published in the same paper? When E&P contacted the Times' Lynette Clemetson, author of the first story, she would only say: "I advocated for broader coverage of the march, and I regret that we didn't run a more comprehensive story."
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