[Peace-discuss] media frenzy over Schiavo case

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thought folks might find this bit of media analysis
interesting.  Of course it's news to none of us that
the news media often have their priorities upside down
when it comes to coverage, but this article makes some
interesting points.  

I do think the author is off base if he's really
dismissing the value of protest in a
liberal-capitalist democracy, whether we agree with
the protesters or not.   Of course, it is intersting
to compare how protesters on different issues are
treated in the media.

Ricky

Copyright 2005 Salon.com, Inc.  
Salon.com

March 31, 2005 Thursday

A tale told by an idiot

By Eric Boehlert

It was fitting that reporters were in danger of
outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri
Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday
morning. When one man began to play the trumpet
moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50
a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him,
two or three deep.

Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so
out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a
story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate"
nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the
Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a
country can have a "furious debate" when two-thirds of
its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of
some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and
President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five
Americans agree.

But the "furious debate" angle has been a crucial
selling point in the Schiavo story in part because
editors and producers could never justify the
extraordinary amount of time and resources they set
aside for the story if reporters made plain in
covering it every day that the issue was being driven
by a very small minority who were out of step with the
mainstream. 

Clearly, the press went overboard in its
around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case.
But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost
to be expected from news organizations, particularly
television, desperate for compelling narratives that
can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And
it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a
manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine
interest. It did.

What is telling about the excessive coverage is how
right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from
Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if
on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up
what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family
legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered
story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left
approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the
past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have
mentioned "Schiavo" more than 15,000 times. By
comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian
humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned
"tsunami" approximately 9,000 times, according to
TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for
television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just
2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo
mania ran rampant.)

Conservatives not only launched the story but were
able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost
exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being
tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly
cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters
about obvious factual errors in some of their
statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two
neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine
Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly,
however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford
undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning
fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days:
"You don't have any idea what you are talking about,"
Cranford said.)

As the story played out on Page 1 nationwide, the
press served as a platform for pro-life protesters.
They were invited to sound off against tyrannical
judges and Nazi-like politicians and denigrate Michael
Schiavo at will while reporters eagerly transcribed
protesters' personal -- and often outrageous --
attacks, yet never dared to use the word "radical" to
describe their actions.

And when it became clear that Americans were
overwhelmingly opposed to the unprecedented
intervention by Congress and the president, the press
quietly looked the other way, once again proving that
the Bush White House doesn't have to worry about bad
press -- Beltway reporters still seem unwilling, or
incapable, of delivering it.

Thursday afternoon, CNN began running a promo for its
prime-time Schiavo special, "Life and Death: American
Speaks Out." Based on the rapid-fire images in the ad
-- one after another of pro-life protesters and
spokesmen for various conservative groups -- a better
title might have been "Life and Death: America's
Conservative Minority Speaks Out."

The Schiavo coverage was reminiscent of what followed
the death last year of former President Ronald Reagan,
when CNN and other news outlets simply handed over
their airtime to conservatives for days at a time.

The Schiavo coverage started off with a strikingly
deferential tone. For instance, on March 22 CNN's John
King, interviewing Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, "You say
Congress has the authority. I don't think anyone
questions that, that Congress has the authority to
grant federal jurisdiction for this case, if you
will." That statement was false -- legions of legal
scholars have noted that Congress has no authority to
pass legislation in a specific legal case that
effectively trumps state court findings.

Again and again CNN in particular seemed to do its
best to accommodate the Pinellas Park noisemakers.
Last week host Miles O'Brien adopted pro-life
protesters' language and began referring to Michael
Schiavo as the "estranged husband." As Media Matters
for America noted, on March 24, CNN host Daryn Kagan
said there are "a lot of people in this country
agreeing with [pro-life protesters] that this would be
a death without dignity." Kagan added that there are
"strong, divided opinions across the country." Yet
poll after poll showed that Americans were not
strongly divided on this issue, and that most did not
believe removing Schiavo's feeding tube would mean
death without dignity. When pro-life supporters
choreographed with police the arrest of several
children outside Schiavo's hospice, CNN reporter Bob
Franken, in hushed tones, described the "poignant"
scene. Remarking on the report on his Web site, James
Wolcott wrote, "Franken's sentimentalizing of this
pious photo-op is more proof that the so-called
[mainstream media] is so cautious about being
respectful of religion that it refuses to recognize
the raw face of fanaticism even when it's filling the
camera lens. Practically nothing is said about the
backgrounds of the nutjob organizers of these sickly
pseudo-events, leaving the impression that is simply
People of Conscience converging on Florida to bear
witness and catch some rays."

It's true that press outlets were very slow to pick up
on the Sunday Charlotte Observer's story that Scott
Heldreth, a religious activist and antiabortion
crusader who helped stage the children's arrest
outside Schiavo's hospice, is a registered sex
offender in Florida. "The former Naperville, Fla.,
resident remains listed on the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement's sex offender registry," the Observer
reported.

Nor was much said about the background of Randall
Terry, who became a constant presence on television as
the Schindlers' "family spokesman." Viewers and
readers heard almost nothing about Terry's extremist
background as an antiabortion activist who tried to
present dead fetuses to Bill Clinton during the 1992
Democratic Convention and who has talked about his
wish that one specific abortion provider be
"executed."

The press also downplayed references to a 2000 trial
at which Schiavo's extremely conservative Roman
Catholic parents conceded that even if Terri had told
them she would never want to be kept alive with a
feeding tube, they would not have honored that request
(an acknowledgment that goes a long way toward
explaining their actions in the case). For the most
part, the press portrayed Schiavo's parents, Terry and
the hospice protesters as simply being overly
concerned and vaguely conservative. And nothing more.

Meanwhile, when polls found Americans aghast at the
GOP's power play and the Schiavo story fell apart
politically for Republicans, the press appeared almost
reluctant -- or embarrassed -- to point out how badly
the GOP had blundered.

Fox News' Brit Hume, clearly trying to downplay Bush's
role in the story, informed viewers, "I guess [Bush's]
intervention consisted mostly of a signature and some
statements from the White House." On CBS's "Face the
Nation," Time reporter Karen Tumulty made a similar
comment. Addressing a pro-life guest she noted, "You
described the action of the Congress and the president
as very restrained in this case, although the polls
would indicate three-quarters of the American public
thinks that the Congress in particular really went too
far" (emphasis added). In fact, according to CBS's own
poll, Americans blamed both Bush and Congress equally,
in part because pollsters asked about the action of
"Congress and the president."

Newsweek's 2,500-word feature this week on Schiavo
inserted this timid mention into the 14th paragraph of
a 15-paragraph story: "Given polls showing solid
majorities supporting the tube's withdrawal,
Republicans may have overplayed their hand" (emphasis
added). The newsweekly did not mention that Bush's job
approval ratings have fallen to a new low in the wake
of the Schiavo intervention.

It's hard to imagine that if President Clinton (or a
president Al Gore or John Kerry) had cut short his
vacation to fly back to the White House in order to
sign controversial legislation, and three days later
network polls showed the legislation to be wildly
unpopular, reporters would not have asked, How did the
president become so out of touch with the mainstream?
Who at the White House is to blame for the fiasco? How
is the administration going to recover politically?

There was little or none of that critical analysis in
Bush's case. In fact, on Monday, on the heels of the
Republicans' first disastrous Schiavo week, the New
York Times ran two detailed articles about the state
of the White House. One chronicled how "confident,"
"frisky" and "impishly fun" the president was feeling,
and politely avoided any Schiavo references.

Running alongside that article was the umpteenth wet
kiss directed toward White House political strategist
Karl Rove, in which he was toasted for his mastery of
political maneuvering. The article said that Rove was
also now micromanaging the president's schedule for
political purposes -- "deciding where Mr. Bush and
other administration officials go as they crisscross
the country trying to win public support." It's safe
to assume that Rove played a role in Bush's decision
to fly back to the White House to sign the emergency
Schiavo bill into law -- a P.R. blunder yet unequaled
in Bush's second term. The Times remained obediently
silent on that point as well.

And that's when the paper wasn't busy tipping its cap
to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for his high-profile role in
the Schiavo crisis. In a March 25 article, "In a
Polarizing Case, Jeb Bush Cements His Political
Stature," the Times assured readers that "even critics
said [Bush's actions] were rooted in a deep-seated
opposition to abortion and euthanasia rather than in
political position." The article, however, failed to
name a single critic who agreed that Bush's motives
were rooted in deep-seated opposition to abortion. In
fact, the one Democrat quoted in the story, Scott
Maddox, departing as chairman of the Florida
Democratic Party, blasted the governor: "This is less
about Terri Schiavo and more about shoring up the
Republican base, and that's a shame. Politics has to
be in play here."

Then again, from the time the Schiavo story first
became a Page 1 sensation, it took the New York Times
eight days -- and a couple of dozen articles -- before
one of its reporters informed readers that polls
showed an overwhelming majority of Americans
disapproved of federal attempts to intervene in the
case.

The excessive media coverage of the Schiavo story
wasn't the most disturbing part. It was how, too
often, journalists appeared to be afraid of the facts.

LOAD-DATE: April 1, 2005 



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