By Victor Greto
Hours before the war with Iraq began late in the evening of March 19th, Kelly’s Logan House bar at Wilmington’s Trolley Square was nearly empty.
Noel Moon, 39, an accountant and one of only three customers at the bar, stared up at a television tuned loudly to news coverage. Less than a half hour from the end of the President Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, Moon playfully rubbed his hands together and looked over at his girlfriend with a grin. “We got 20 minutes, honey,” he said. “Let’s go home and make some popcorn. It’s like a movie.”
More than two weeks after blanket coverage of the war, the popcorn may be getting stale.
Recent polls, surveys and television ratings show an American public tiring of the media’s saturation coverage of the war, although the public remains relatively confident that both the media and the government are telling them the truth.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday noted that during the first week of news coverage, more than half of all Americans rated it as “excellent,” while a third called it “good.” During the second week, however, only 38 percent called the coverage excellent, while 41 percent called it good. One in five called it fair or poor.
Approval of media coverage also depended on whether the person interviewed approves of the war, the poll showed. For those who approved of the war during the first week, 57 percent said the coverage was excellent, while only 38 percent of those who disapproved thought it so. By the second week, both numbers had crashed: 41 percent of those who approved of the war said the coverage was excellent, while only 29 percent of those who disapproved said so.
Those numbers make perfect sense, said R. Thomas Berner, a media expert at Pennsylvania State University.
“It’s damaging to all-news TV,” he said. “They’re in danger of overindulging in this reality TV. The problem is that it could undermine American support for the war or the troops because the public sees it as an ongoing TV program.”
Because the media has direct access to troops through more than 700 embedded reporters, the government has been repeatedly questioned about battlefield checkpoints, the killings of civilians and the misguided assumption that most Iraqis would welcome American troops.
“The second-guessing that’s going on,” Berner said, “is part of the fact that we’re in a society that’s into instant gratification and that thinks it should be over.”
Aside from polls and surveys, television ratings show a decreasing interest from the public. Last week, Fox News averaged 4.4 million viewers, compared with 3.7 million who watched CNN and 1.9 million for MSNBC, an 18 percent decrease from the week the war began.
Wilmington resident Adele Madden, however, has no doubt that media coverage has improved over what she saw during the Vietnam War. To her, reporters following troops and 24-hour coverage is good.
“I like the fact that it’s not Vietnam all over again, where the reporting of what’s happening is filtered,” she said. “I like knowing we’re getting a truer picture now than we did then.”
Along with many other Americans, she’s progressively stopped watching as much of the war as she did after it began. “You just physically and emotionally can’t handle the bombardment of information that’s coming at you without backing away from it temporarily and regrouping,” she said.
A recent Pew People and the Press survey showed that Americans increasingly feel sad watching the war on TV. More than half felt sad watching coverage during the first week, while about two-thirds felt sad by the second week. Nearly half of the people watching said it tired them out to watch so much, up from less than a third during the first week.
Although Cel Mock of Hockessin said she’s been watching “a fair amount of coverage, I am sometimes saturated or overwhelmed by it and must change channels, go for a walk, or pick up a book.”
Even with the information overload, however, “I do not feel like I personally really know if we should be there,” Mock said. “I don’t feel like I have the same information as our President and his advisors, nor do I feel like what I see and hear is the entire truth.”
That sort of reaction reflects several problems with saturation media coverage, said Stephen Cimbala, a political science and military expert at Penn State.
“Because there’s so much more information, it’s harder for the viewer to sort out,” he said. “There’s a cacophony of voices and talking heads and interruptions for breaking news, so that’s the first problem.”
The other problem for viewers is the Pentagon’s decision to allow reporters with troops, he said, contrary to what had been allowed in both Vietnam and during the Gulf War.
“A reporter at the front is going to have a restricted view of the action,” he said. “The technology makes all this stuff immediately transmitted, so that gets in the way of perspective. The World War II correspondents checked the story out three to four times before filing. Now, there’s a rush to judgment, trying to beat the other all-news channels to the punch.”
Berner agreed.
“With the embedded journalists, we get this series of live presentations, usually with the video phone, but it doesn’t give us the big picture,” he said. Berner, however, said that these reporters “were good public relations” for the military.
Cimbala also called the decision to allow reporters to follow troops a “net plus for the military,” despite the Geraldo Rivera incident, where the Fox News reporter gave sketchy information about the location of some American troops when he drew a few lines in the sand. He has since been reassigned to Kuwait.
The government last week ordered Philip Smucker of the Christian Science Monitor to leave the war zone because, officials argued, he revealed potentially harmful information about troop location while he was on the air with CNN. The strategy works, Berner said, because the military “co-opted the media, so now the press can’t complain they’re being excluded.”
The danger, he said, is that “these guys are sleeping with their sources, so it’s kind of hard to show a negative story. On the other hand, the embedded journalists may prove their value not as journalists but as historians when they write their books, long after the war is over.”
Coverage of the war by the media, Berner said, starkly shows the differences between television news and other forms of journalism.
“The coverage of the war on TV is proving the value of newspapers and magazines because you can read them carefully,” he said. “Information is not contained in a graphic that flies by you.”
But Madden said TV coverage does not feel shallow to her. “I have no sense that it’s just a TV show,” she said. “If anything, it’s almost surreal that you can physically watch it happening.”