Category: FAIR Studies

September 24, 2021

Missing Voices in Broadcast Coverage of Afghan Withdrawal

As the US after 20 years finally began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the story dominated TV news. Just as they did when the war began (Extra!, 11–12/01), corporate journalists overwhelmingly leaned on government and military sources, while offering no clear antiwar voices and vanishingly few perspectives from civil society leaders in either Afghanistan or the United States.

FAIR studied a week of Afghanistan coverage (8/15–21/21), starting with the day the Taliban took back Kabul. We looked at the three primetime broadcast news shows, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, identifying 74 sources across the three shows.

Who got to speak?

Afghan women made up just 5% of sources in nightly news stories on the Afghanistan withdrawal (ABC, 8/16/21).

Of these sources, 23 sources were Afghans (20) or identified as Afghan Americans (3)—31% of all sources. Only 11 of these 23—fewer than half—were identified by at least a first name, and only four were women. (Afghans often have only one name.) While three Afghan sources were identified as professionals who might have offered informed commentary on the broader political or historical situation—a journalist, a member of parliament and a nonprofit director—the vast majority of questions to all Afghan and Afghan American sources were about their personal risk and situation, essentially providing “color” rather than expert opinion to the story.

Americans who were not Afghans comprised the remaining 51 sources, with no other nationalities represented. Of these US sources, 31 were non-Pentagon government officials, and 16 were current or former military, from the secretary of Defense to enlisted soldiers. The remainder were three parents of Americans killed in the war, and a non-Afghan US citizen evacuating from Afghanistan.

The partisan breakdown of US officials was 29 Democrats to eight Republicans, with President Joe Biden accounting for 14 of the Democratic sources, and other members of his administration accounting for 12.

No scholars or antiwar activists from either the US or Afghanistan were featured. Only two civil society leaders made appearances: the director of a nonprofit women’s organization in Afghanistan (8/16/21) and the president of a New York City veterans’ organization (8/16/21).

Despite the media’s emphasis on the plight of women in Afghanistan as a result of US withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21), women were rarely considered experts, or even voices worth hearing on this story: Only eight sources were female (11% of the total), two of whom were unnamed.

No independent defense of withdrawal

Sen. Mitch McConnell (NBC, 8/16/21): The Afghan situation is “a stain on the reputation of the United States of America.”

Biden, who played a key role in leading the country into the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 1/9/20), was essentially the strongest “antiwar” voice in the conversation. While he and his administration frequently defended their decision to uphold the withdrawal agreement, there were no other sources who did so.

Of the three non-administration Democratic sources, two encouraged an extension of the withdrawal deadline. All of the Republican sources criticized either the commitment to or the process of withdrawal. Most of the remaining sources were also critical of the process.

The final days of the occupation were without question chaotic. But by only featuring sources who emphasized the “stain” on the US’s “reputation” (Sen. Mitch McConnell, NBC, 8/16/21), or the idea that “the Americans left us behind, and left us to those people who are not human and cut our heads off in front of our families” (Abdul, ABC, 8/20/21), a discussion of the tragedy of the 20-year occupation itself was completely foreclosed.

Journalists’ continued jingoism

And corporate journalists themselves, who have often been the loudest cheerleaders for the Afghanistan War (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/17/01, 8/25/09, 1/31/19), continued their jingoism in the face of the withdrawal.

NBC‘s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel (8/16/21), for instance, offered an echo of—rather than a counterpoint to—McConnell and Abdul: “A 20-year war, the longest in US history, today ended a disgrace. The US leaving behind a country its citizens are too terrified to live in.”

Similarly, CBS‘s Norah O’Donnell (8/16/21) declared: “When America leaves, for many, so does the hope—the hope of freedom, the hope for human rights. And in its place comes the sheer terror of what’s next.” O’Donnell went on to detail the number of Americans killed and wounded, plus the unspecified “cost to America’s national security.”

Anand Gopal (New Yorker, 9/13/21): “To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.”

Given that the withdrawal was an acknowledgement that after 20 years of occupation, the US had little control over what kind of country it would be “leaving behind,” it’s hard to imagine a withdrawal that Engel would not have considered a disgrace. But while he and O’Donnell highlighted the plight of “many” Afghans, neither made any mention of the number of Afghans killed and wounded in the 20-year war, which was at least 27 times higher than US casualties, according to the Costs of War project (9/1/21) at Brown University. That project estimated at least 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed, including more than 500 humanitarian workers and journalists, along with over 69,000 national military and police and more than 52,000 opposition fighters.

But these tallies—which do not even include the wounded, or excess (indirect) deaths—are almost certainly undercounts. New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal, who has spent years covering the war, including time in rural Afghanistan, believes that the available death tolls have “grossly undercounted” civilian casualties, as much of the ongoing conflict has taken place in outlying areas where deaths frequently go unrecorded (Democracy Now!, 9/16/21).

Gopal’s recent article (New Yorker, 9/13/21) on rural Afghan women recounted his investigation in the largely rural Helmand province, where he interviewed a random selection of 12 households, finding that each had lost, on average, 10 to 12 civilians to the war. While Taliban rule was not popular among those he interviewed, it was clearly preferred to US occupation, which had empowered even more ruthless warlords and ensured unending conflict, airstrikes and terror in the region.

This perspective was not to be found on US TV news coverage of the withdrawal, with its correspondents reporting from the airbase in Kabul, an Afghanistan a world apart from that known by the majority of the country’s population.

Rosy picture of occupation

Lester Holt (NBC, 8/16/21): “Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war, it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness.”

NBC‘s Lester Holt (8/16/21), who visited Afghanistan in 2010 and 2012, offered a typical assessment, painting the occupation as a sensitive operation bringing Afghanistan out of darkness into a brighter future:

Traveling across Afghanistan a decade into the war [2012], it was hard not to feel some optimism, as if we were witness to a country emerging from darkness…. Through the war, epic American-led battles reclaim cities and villages from the Taliban. US commanders nurture trust among village elders believing in Afghanistan’s future. And now, in the chaos, we’re left to wonder how that future has been so rapidly rewritten with chapters from Afghanistan’s past.

Two weeks later, on the eve of the official withdrawal, CBS‘s O’Donnell (8/30/21) asked longtime Pentagon correspondent David Martin, “What does this moment mean?” Martin responded:

To me, it’s on all of us. All of us as American citizens. We as a country could not summon the will to outlast the Taliban. We sent more than 800,000 troops to fight in the war. The vast majority of them did everything we asked of them. They would have gone back for another 20 years if we had asked them. But the country grew tired of the war, and they elected political leaders, both Democratic and Republican, who wanted to end it. History will decide whether that was right or wrong. But either way, Norah, it’s on us.

Norah O’Donnell (CBS, 8/26/21): “The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity.”

O’Donnell herself (CBS, 8/26/21) painted a rosy picture of the occupation a few days prior :

This is what American troops were doing before terrorists struck today: feeding children, playing with kids, lending an arm to the elderly. The American military is the greatest in the world, not only because of its superior force, but because of its humanity—soldiers providing a helping hand, pulling Afghan infants to safety. This child kept warm by the uniform of a US soldier during her evacuation. This mother delivered her baby in the cargo bay of a C-17, naming the newborn Reach, after the call sign of the aircraft that rescued her.

For the last two decades, our mission has been about keeping us safe at home and improving the lives of Afghans. The 13 US service members who made the ultimate sacrifice today did not die in vain. One hundred thousand people have been evacuated because of their heroic actions. They answered the call and did what they were trained to do. A reminder of the high price of freedom. And God bless our US troops.

Obviously, the families of the thousands of Afghan civilians killed in US airstrikes—many of them children—or those victimized by rogue soldiers, might have a different perspective on the US military. Those voices, too, might have helped explain to journalists like Holt, and his viewers, why Afghanistan’s future looks the way it does, rather than the rosy, peaceful outcome those journalists seem to have expected the US to have supplied.

Veteran voices

The perspectives of US troops were occasionally presented, but segments featuring veterans’ voices seemed largely intended to reassure viewers that the 20-year war was worth it. “Some veterans are thinking, was it worth it? Were our sacrifices worth it?” O’Donnell (CBS, 8/18/21) said, followed immediately by a soundbite from a veteran: “It was worth it…. We gave Afghanistan two decades of freedom. It made the world a better place.”

Notably, post–9/11 veterans had soured on the war over the past decade. While a 2011 Pew poll found that 50% believed the Afghanistan War had been worth fighting, the outfit’s 2019 poll found that number had dropped to 38%—roughly on par with the general public. Afghanistan veterans were more likely than the general public to support the withdrawal—58% vs. 52%—even after it was well underway and the subject of widespread one-sidedly hostile media coverage (Morning Consult, 9/9/21).

Research assistance: James Baratta, Elias Khoury, Dorothy Poucher, Jasmine Watson

Featured image: NBC Nightly News (8/16/21)

The post Missing Voices in Broadcast Coverage of Afghan Withdrawal appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 21, 2021

Tabloids Want Crime, Not Rent, on NYC Voters’ Minds
New York City voters will finish choosing their Democratic mayoral candidate in primary elections tomorrow. With no strong Republican candidates, the winner of the primary is widely expected to become the next mayor of the country’s biggest city.

Recent polls have consistently shown that the top issue for New York City voters in the mayoral race is crime. And in a tight race, that emphasis appears to be giving the edge to Brooklyn Borough president and former NYPD officer Eric Adams, who strongly opposes the Defund the Police movement.

Rise in (some) crime

While there have been more murders so far this year in New York City (194) than in any other year of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, that’s well below how many were committed in the same period in every year of Rudy Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, and fewer than in that time frame in nine of Michael Bloomberg’s 12 years in office.

But why do voters rank crime at the top of their list? It’s true that some crimes have increased since the start of the pandemic. NYPD CompStat data show that there have been 194 murders so far this year in New York City, a pretty sharp increase over the past two years; there had been 171 murders at this point last year, and 127 in the same period in 2019. Shooting incidents likewise are up this year.

But while murders get the most attention, they’re also the rarest violent crime in NYC. Robberies are at their lowest point in decades, and misdemeanor assaults are sharply down the past two years; the 2021 rate so far is 22% lower than at this point in 2019. Felony assaults are up, but only 2% from the most recent 5-year average. (These disparities are consistent with crime increases being primarily driven by record levels of gun purchases, rather than by the reforms of policing that are often blamed for the rise in the murder rate.)

Looking just a bit farther back, you can see that New York is nowhere near its “bad old days” of crime. In 1993, the earliest year for which the NYPD provides year-to-date crime numbers, there were 718 murders at this point in the year—3.7 times higher than today. In fact, the current number is just a hair higher than the 191 to this point in 2012—a year when murders reached a record low, and then–Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted it as “the safest big city in America” (Gothamist, 12/28/12).

The overall crime numbers, combining the seven major crimes the NYPD tracks, are lower so far this year than any previous year, and less than a third their year-to-date total in 1996, the earliest year with such totals in CompStat (and a year when the city’s population was roughly a million people smaller than its current 8.4 million).

Brutal rent burdens

Evictions in New York City are heavily concentrated in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. (Source: Furman Center)

Meanwhile, New York City has long been facing a serious housing crisis. The number of single adults in shelters has reached record levels, public housing has faced a string of scandals (Politico, 8/14/20) and tenants continue to face punishingly high rents. Two-thirds of city households rent their homes, and in the past 10-15 years, incomes have not kept pace with rent increases. As a result, fully half of renters are considered “rent burdened,” meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. A majority of those making less than $50,000 a year are severely rent burdened, spending more than half their household income on rent (Furman Center, 3/24/20, 2020).

The pandemic did send some residents fleeing and helped bring rents down a bit in certain areas. Those who left were mostly middle- and upper-income households, and most of the rent softening was concentrated in Manhattan and high-end markets (CNBC, 10/31/20). But for many renters, the past year was brutal: Households owing back rent saw their rental arrears spike by 66%, and the number of households with extreme rent debt doubled (Furman Center, 2020).

New Yorkers’ odds of being severely rent burdened are about 1 in 6, and of being in extreme debt to a landlord about 1 in 9. By comparison, the chance of being murdered in New York City last year was less than 1 in 18,000; the chance of being shot was less than one in 5,000.

Tabloids’ crime compulsion

Daily News front pages (11/23/20) focused on crime even more than the New York Post.

Yet the city’s two big tabloid dailies—which offer far more local coverage than its biggest paper, the New York Times—paint a dramatically different picture. Both papers gave far more coverage to crime than to the affordable housing crisis in the past year.

FAIR searched the Nexis news database for New York Post and New York Daily News articles that included the terms “crime,” “affordable housing,” “supportive housing,” “rent control” or “eviction,” from 6/18/20 through 6/18/21. The Daily News ran 1,365 stories that mentioned crime and only 166 that mentioned these housing crisis terms, a ratio of roughly 8 to 1; at the Post, the difference was 1,696 to 182, or closer to 10 to 1.

As stark as they are, those numbers don’t take into account front pages—the most visible and often most sensationalist part of the papers. And stories of violence appeared again and again on page 1 throughout the past year: 85 times at the Daily News and 57 times at the Post. By comparison, stories about the housing crisis–mostly dealing with homelessness–appeared 12 times on the front page of the Daily News and just twice on the Post‘s page 1.

At the Daily News, readers were treated to such front-page headlines as:
- “Carnage and Chaos; Shootings, Slayings Soar Over the Last Year; City EMS Crews Stressed to Crisis Levels” (11/23/20)
- “Guns Blaze in Bronx; Like the Wild West as Cop Shooter Is Killed; 2 Marshalls, 1 Finest Hurt” (12/5/20)
- “New Year Same Fear; No Letup From 2020 Mayhem as Bullets Ring Out After Ball Drops” (1/2/21).
The New York Post (5/10/21) not-so-subtly linked its support for Eric Adams to its sensationalized crime coverage.

Meanwhile, the Rupert Murdoch–owned Post, lacking any viable Republican candidate to endorse, ran a front-page endorsement of Adams on May 10, featured on the top half of the page; the bottom half blared: “I Don’t Want to Die: Mom Shot in Times Square; No One Would Even Help Me.” The day before (5/9/21), the paper had given the Times Square shooting front-page status (“Times Square Mayhem”), and two days before that (5/7/21), the front-page headline was “War on Our Streets; DA: Gang Battle Behind Killing of 1-Year-Old.”

(The Post took a break from front-page crime stories on May 8 to announce, “Companies Go Begging as Rich Benefits Keep Workers Home.”)

Other notable recent front-page crime headlines from the Post: “Kill or Be Killed” (4/12/21), “Knife Horror on Subway” (5/15/21) and “Stop the Bloodshed” (with the accompanying editorial teased below: “This Is Why Vote for Mayor Matters”—5/19/21).

Sympathy for the landlord

A rare example of a New York Post article (3/14/21) expressing sympathy for a homeless person.

Similar front-page histrionics over the housing crisis could not be found at either paper. Even the Post‘s paltry number of mentions of the housing crisis overstate its attention to renters’ plight, as the paper’s definition of “crisis” when it comes to NYC housing is quite different from most New Yorkers’. You’ll rarely find the paper covering—let alone lamenting—the situation facing low-income renters. Indeed, a great many of the Post articles we counted argue against things like rent control and the eviction moratorium, and paint landlords as the primary victims of any housing crisis.

To wit: A Post editorial (4/25/21) blasted a rent-control bill “that would clobber the housing market,” arguing that rents “have plunged to decade-long lows.” The tabloid ran an article (3/13/21) about a landlord who lives in her car because she’s been unable to evict her “deadbeat tenant” under the Covid eviction moratorium. “Kill the Rent Laws Now,” blared another editorial (10/25/20).

Covering the news that almost 1 in 5 rent-regulated tenants in New York City were more than two months behind on rent, the Post turned this into a story about the landlords who were owed the rent, quoting only a landlord interest group and a landlord’s daughter (“We have nothing. We are completely destitute.”).

In the Daily News‘ reporting on the eviction moratorium, which constituted a large chunk of its housing coverage, it typically offered up quotes from both tenants and landlords (e.g., “‘I don’t like owing anybody’: NYC tenants hail pandemic-related rent relief, but landlords remain skeptical,” 4/11/21). The editorial page (8/7/20), arguing for Congress to extend the federal eviction moratorium in August, did talk about “the enormity of the housing crisis”— though related only to the pandemic, and not NYC-specific—but it hasn’t mentioned affordable housing issues since last September.

In the paper’s endorsement (5/15/21) of centrist Kathryn Garcia—which it found only “a cut above Adams, and head and shoulders over the others”—the editorial board highlighted budget shortfalls, education, public safety and climate change as the major issues facing the next mayor, writing that “incidents of scary, random violence seem to be on the rise.”

As the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads.” One can imagine attention-grabbing coverage of the housing crisis—there’s no shortage of human tragedy in that story—but the real estate industry has long been a major newspaper advertiser, and a major political force in New York City in general. Story after story about people losing their homes or overwhelmed by rent debt don’t sit well next to cheery ads for new luxury apartments in the real estate section.

If they did, people’s perceptions of the top issues facing the city might look very different—and so might the mayoral race.

Research assistance from Steven Keehner and Elias Khoury.

The post Tabloids Want Crime, Not Rent, on NYC Voters’ Minds appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
June 19, 2021

TV News Coverage of Southern Border Lacks Refugee Sources, Historical Context

A new FAIR study finds that TV news coverage of the southern US border largely ignores the experiences and voices of those most impacted by the immigration system.

Despite the Biden administration’s promise of a more humane immigration approach, thousands of children continue to be detained at the border. The issue has gotten widespread media attention, but in a highly sensationalized manner that lacks critical analysis as well as historical context (FAIR.org, 3/25/21, 5/24/21).

FAIR studied the coverage of migration at the US southern border on five major evening TV news shows: CNN’s Situation Room, ABC World News Tonight, Fox News Special Report, MSNBC‘s The Beat and CBS Evening News, from March 14 to April 14.

Who spoke in border stories?

Over this period, these five shows featured 194 sources over 60 segments on the border issue. (Several of these were repeat appearances by the same guests; we counted 113 unique sources total.)

Most sources—122, or 63%—were current or former US government officials. Of these government sources, 66% were Democrats, mostly from the Biden administration: The top three sources were Joe Biden, with 18 appearances, White House press secretary Jen Psaki with 14 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas with 12.

While migrants and refugees were frequently shown on air, only 11 migrant/refugee sources were heard from—a total of 6% of all sources. Three of the migrant/refugee sources were unnamed. Notably, the migrant/refugee voices had hardly any dialogue. Most interactions were translations of short answers, such as “a lot of dangers here in Mexico” (Gustavo Mendez, CBS 3/22/21) or “a better life for your children” (unnamed Guatemalan woman, CBS, 3/23/21).

Migrant/refugee sources had on average one sentence apiece, or around 11 words, and a total of 126 words spoken between them. There were almost twice as many law enforcement sources (21), who spoke a total of 736 words.

Words Spoken by Sources in Border Stories: Migrants/Refugees vs. Law Enforcement

Of all sources for which immigration status and race/ethnicity could be identified, 74% were US-born, 72% were male and over half were non-Latinx whites. Only 22 sources were immigrant citizens/residents, and of these, 19 were high-ranking government officials, mostly repeat appearances by Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s chief of DHS, and Sen. Ted Cruz, both of whom are wealthy white Latino men whose immigration experiences are very different from those of the mostly poor and Indigenous people being detained at the border. As Roberto Lovato, Salvadoran-American journalist, wrote (CJR, 6/26/18): “What good is a Latino politician when the voices of people at the border, of experts, and of leaders from their large communities in the US are erased?”

Varying representation

The shows varied significantly in their coverage. At one end of the spectrum, 40% of the sources on CBS Evening News were from the US government, whereas fully 92% of CNN‘s sources were current or former officials. US government officials made up 72% of sources on Fox, 57% on MSNBC and 51% on ABC.

The shows varied significantly in their coverage. At one end of the spectrum, 41% of the sources on CBS Evening News were from the US government, whereas fully 92% of CNN‘s sources were current or former officials. US government officials made up 72% of sources on Fox, 60% on ABC, and 57% on MSNBC.

Six of the sources on CBS were migrants/refugees; ABC aired five migrant/refugee sources. There were zero migrant/refugee sources on CNN, Fox or MSNBC.

CBS (4/6/21) and MSNBC (4/12/21) did offer exceptional investigative reports by going to Guatemala, where many US migrants/refugees originate, and speaking with locals and government officials about how recent hurricanes worsened people’s living conditions, and the effect of Biden’s immigration messaging on people there.

CBS also had the most immigrant and Latinx representation among its reporters: 41% (7 reporters) were immigrants and 82% (14) were Latinx. In contrast, CNN and ABC had zero immigrant reporters, and Fox had one immigrant reporter from Australia. Although representation does not necessarily translate to better reporting, it is notable that CBS Evening News stands out among the shows in terms of featuring reporters that might better relate to the stories being told.

Missing context providers

Notably marginalized were Central American scholars, immigrant activists or journalists who could have challenged the dominant government voices or provided greater historical context and analysis of the complex issues around immigration.

Only 7% of the sources were immigrant advocates, most of whom were from nonprofits that tended to support Biden’s “compassionate” rhetoric, but said little about his actual policies—such as Sister Norma Pimentel, who was asked, “What makes this time so much different than previous years?” on CBS News (3/17/21):

There’s several components that are definitely different. The fact that we have a president, an administration that is very open to respond in a very caring, compassionate, and a very respectful way to human life.

There was only one source, immigrant advocate Erika Andola (MSNBC, 3/24/21), who spoke to the broader issue of the carceral immigration system as a whole:

We have chosen to send Rambo to the border, instead of sending Mother Teresa, right? We are sending more and more money for Border Patrol, for militarization to the border. And I can go on and on, instead of figuring out, how do we create our infrastructure that can welcome people, so we don’t have to open these kinds of reception centers or detention centers for children that pop up every now and then?

Partisan framing

Both TV news and Democratic and Republican government sources, for different purposes, mentioned Biden’s attitude as the reason more migrant/refugees were coming to the border (CBS, 3/21/21; MSNBC, 3/23/21, 3/24/21, 3/25/21, 4/12/21; Fox, 3/30/21, 3/24/21, 3/25/21). Fox tended to feature reporters and sources who called Biden’s policy of allowing unaccompanied minors to stay too lenient, resulting in a humanitarian crisis at the border.

Centrist corporate media pushed a narrative that distinguished Biden from Trump as a humane president, and downplayed the conditions children were subjected to at the border or excused them as Trump’s fault. MSNBC in particular featured pundits that boosted this line of a more “compassionate” (3/25/21) and “caring” (3/24/21) administration.

CBS reporter Christina Ruffini (3/21/21) introduced her segment on March 21: “His [Biden] administration’s compassionate approach to immigration policy has been confused for leniency, and a record 15,000 migrant children are now in U.S. custody.” CBS‘s own reporting contradicted this line; after speaking with migrants/refugees at the border about why they are coming, correspondent Manuel Bojorquez (3/23/21) reported that it is less about policy change and more about the conditions migrants/refugees are fleeing.

Who’s to blame for ‘crisis’?

The news shows routinely referred to the border situation as a “crisis,” using the word at least once in 40 out of 60 segments to describe the border situation. Much of the conversation revolved around which administration—Trump’s or Biden’s—was to blame for it, as if the inhumane conditions and detention of migrant/refugee children at the border did not predate the last five years:

[Biden’s] cleaning up a mess that was left there by President Trump, and his systematic and inhumane attacks on the immigration system.

— Sen. Tammy Duckworth (CNN, 3/22/21)

It is an emergency. It is a crisis. It is one of their [Biden administration’s] own making.

— Sen. John Thune (CBS, 3/24/21)

None of the few migrant voices that made it on air supported this blame game, and instead spoke about the oppressive conditions they were fleeing, and those they continued to endure. An unnamed migrant woman interviewed in a shelter in Tucson, Arizona, who had been recently separated from her son, said on CBS (4/1/21) : “You got to this country, a country of freedoms, and now you’ve been separated.”

Because the media framed the situation at the border as a Biden vs. Trump or Democrats vs. Republicans issue, the only voices aired that were critical of the Biden administration were Republicans blaming Biden for a supposed “open border” policy.

The reality is that over 480,000 people have already been deported since Biden took office, largely using Title 42, a Trump-era policy that Biden has quietly continued. Families are still being separated, albeit not with the same type of force as under Trump (Politico, 3/20/21): Parents now have to make the devastating decision to separate themselves from their children in order for them to at least have a chance at asylum. Biden’s budget request for 2022 has an $18 million increase in funding for ICE, and his administration is still seizing people’s land near the border in order to continue construction of the wall he promised to not build “another foot of” (ABC, 4/20/21).

By giving over the conversation almost entirely to government sources—whose dominant policy positions range from cruel to crueler—TV news offered extremely limited room to highlight and challenge those realities.

Methodology

We used the Nexis news media database to search transcripts of the shows studied from March 14-April 14. We defined a source as any person either asked a question by a journalist or making a statement to a public audience on camera, such as at a press conference. People whose casual comments were incidentally captured on tape were not counted as sources.

The post TV News Coverage of Southern Border Lacks Refugee Sources, Historical Context appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 22, 2021

Sunday Shows Hit Snooze on Climate Alarm

In a year dominated by coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, one might expect other topics to fall lower on the media’s priority list. But the climate crisis has not lessened in intensity; on the contrary, the urgency of addressing it increases each year. (Not to mention that climate change is an important driver of increased disease outbreaks like the current pandemic.) News media must be capable of covering two emergencies at the same time.

Their failure to do so reached shocking levels last year. ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation and NBC‘s Meet the Press didn’t ask a single question that mentioned the climate crisis, climate change or the Green New Deal until more than two-thirds of the way through the year (9/13/20), when wildfires—which, due to climate change, are becoming more frequent and more intense—devastated the West Coast.

CNN‘s State of the Union did little better, asking one tangential question earlier in the year (2/2/20) to Republican Iowa Sen. Jodi Ernst about why she believed the Green New Deal and Medicare for All were socialism but farm subsidies were not. Its coverage of extreme weather beat the other networks by two weeks when it reported on Hurricane Laura in Louisiana (8/30/20).

CBS‘s Margaret Brennan (Face the Nation, 9/13/20) challenged the scientific link between climate change and wildfires by citing an op-ed (Washington Post, 9/12/20) representing the views of a far-right timber lobbying group.

Face the Nation asked only two questions referencing the climate crisis the entire year. In the first, CBS host Margaret Brennan (9/13/20) challenged Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s statement that the wildfires were “a wake-up call for all of us that we have got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change.” Brennan responded:

Governor, I understand that’s your conviction. But I know four former Oregon lawmakers have written an op-ed in the Washington Post, though, saying you can’t blame climate change. Instead, it’s a failure of your state government to prepare, and that warnings were ignored regarding mismanagement of Oregon’s forests. What is your response to that?

Brennan presented climate disruption’s role in wildfires as a mere “conviction” of her guest–not because there was scientific evidence that questioned the connection, but on the basis of an op-ed (Washington Post, 9/12/20) written by a former Republican state representative (not four of them) who’s now associated with a pro-logging group funded by corporate timber interests and linked to far-right militias (Mother Jones, 3/6/20).

In the other question, Brennan (11/8/20) asked West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin if Joe Biden’s “energy message”—which featured a vow to transition away from oil and gas—hurt him in the election.

NBC asked three questions, ABC and Fox News asked four, and CNN asked 13 in their Sunday morning shows. The five shows combined aired a total of only 18 segments in which any questions were asked that referenced the climate crisis. There were 26 questions asked, to 18 guests.

The Sunday shows historically skew overwhelmingly toward official sources—politicians, party operatives and other current or former government officials—who typically account for half or more (FAIR.org, 4/1/12, 5/22/20) of all guests, with journalists making up most of the rest. In 2020, questions about climate skewed even more toward partisan guests, who accounted for all but two of the sources, and received 24 of the 26 questions. (The other two, both on Fox News Sunday, were an actor and a conservative pundit.)

Last April, when there was a crucial role for news outlets to play in clarifying the medical and scientific aspects of the Covid crisis, as well as offering space for vigorous debate over solutions, FAIR (5/22/20) criticized the Sunday shows for sidelining independent public health experts, who comprised only 10% of all guests that month. On climate, however, the shows have proved even worse, inviting not a single climate scientist or other climate expert or advocate as a guest over the entire year.

Of the partisan guests asked about climate issues, 12 were Democrats and only three were Republicans (taking 17 versus seven questions, respectively), despite the fact that Republicans dominated Washington for the year, holding both the White House and Senate and blocking any major climate change legislation. In fact, the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News Sunday shows didn’t pose a single question about the climate crisis to a Republican politician the entire year.

In effect, these shows are allowing politicians to define reality. If Republicans say the climate crisis doesn’t exist, then Sunday hosts—with the exception of CNN—don’t question them about it.

Twelve of the 18 segments centered on the US presidential election or the subsequent presidential transition, five were about the West Coast wildfires and Hurricane Laura, and one was a feature about an actor whose climate activism came up in a question.

CNN‘s Dana Bash. CNN was the only network whose Sunday show posed a question about climate change to a Republican all year.

All but one of the 10 climate-related questions in the extreme weather segments were about whether climate change is an important contributor to extreme weather events of 2020, or whether humans are the main driver of that climate change—questions that have long been settled science. CNN (8/30/20, 9/13/20) posed several such questions to two Republican climate deniers, and the network’s Dana Bash (8/30/20) stated clearly multiple times in her interview some variation of “the overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is responsible for the climate crisis.” While holding Republicans accountable for their climate denial stance is important, it’s also important to go beyond settled science and press them on policy. But with so few questions to Republicans at all, none did so.

What’s more, three Democrats were also asked whether climate change could be blamed for the West Coast wildfires (ABC, 9/13/20; CBS, 9/13/20; CNN, 9/13/20), letting then–President Donald Trump frame the news with his claims that it was simply a “forest management” problem, rather than doing what they ought to have done: set the record straight on what the science says about the role of climate change in wildfires, then use their questions to ask their political guests about government responses based on those scientific facts.

If we have any hope of addressing the climate crisis, journalists have to move beyond debating its existence or importance, and start looking at both its causes—very concretely, looking at culprits—and its solutions. You can’t debate climate solutions without understanding what is driving climate change, yet only 12 questions were asked on the Sunday shows all year that even touched on emissions or the oil and gas industry, and none mentioned agriculture, deforestation or capitalism more generally.

The fossil fuel industry advertised heavily in 2020 “to persuade voters that natural gas is a climate-friendly fuel” (Independent, 8/19/20).

Of those 12 questions, few got the national conversation closer to where it needs to be, instead asking about such things as whether Biden’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050 was “realistic” (ABC, 9/13/20) or the impact of his stance on oil and gas on voters, not the planet (CNN, 10/25/20; Fox News, 10/25/20). On ABC, host Martha Raddatz (10/25/20) asked Democratic strategist Rahm Emanuel whether Biden’s promise in one of the presidential debates to transition away from oil and gas made him “cringe a little bit.”

Meanwhile, the industry didn’t reduce its own media output during the pandemic; in fact, it increased it. The American Petroleum Institute, the largest industry lobbying group, spent over $3.1 million on TV ads—a 51% increase from the year before—falsely touting natural gas as “clean” energy (Independent, 8/19/20). These ads aired during almost the exact same period (1/1/20–8/16/20) that most of the Sunday shows were completely silent on climate.

This post was originally published on FAIR.