CBS: Iraq isn’t important
by Chris 5 comments Leave a comment June 26th, 2008
This news from the NY Times just blew my mind when I read it:
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”
Huh? It sounds like Friedman is saying there is no worthy news coming from Iraq. I think a more honest explanation is that Friedman doesn’t want to put the news from Iraq on TV. I mean, hell, Juan Cole is able to write a roundup of news from Iraq just about every single day. It’s not like the war is over, or everything is hunky dory.
CBS is essentially abdicating their responsibility as a major American news outlet to inform the public. As the New York Times said, we have 150,000 troops there. We spend billions there a day. We have now made ourselves responsible for the well being of the Iraqi people. As long as that state of affairs continues, news from Iraq will remain as salient as ever.
CBS needs to ask themselves a question:
WWWCD? = What Would Walter Cronkite Do?
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To be fair to CBS, all of the big three have been cutting back their coverage:
Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)
The war isn’t over folks.
awesome graphic
Thanks bud.
Isn’t this kind of what you were arguing for in the previous discussion about media bias? You argued that the bias is a good thing as long as it is obvious where that bias lies. Well, it is obvious that CBS’s bias lies with getting more viewers so they get more advertising money. You can’t act upset when the media shows bias you don’t approve of. Now see, I think this fits more with my sentiment that relevant stories should be reported on, and in general their relevance is obvious.
If CBS is going to purport to have a general interest news organization then they should live up to that. I haven’t heard them publicly change their mission. And there is no doubt that Iraq is important. None at all. So they should cover it.
Can’t complain when the bias doesn’t favor what you think it should. I argue that the only bias that should exist in media is one towards important stories.