Comparitive Journalism

A while back, I had an idea for the blog: take a news story and see how it's covered by various media outlets. I filed the idea under "Interesting, But Don't Have Time". Part of the problem was identifying a story that would be worth the effort.

This evening, I think I found one, mostly by accident. John Kerry today gave a speech at New York University that, at least on paper, is finally the compelling argument against the Bush administration on Iraq: they lied us into this war, they didn't plan for the war or the peace, didn't listen to anyone who did think about the war and the peace, and are lying even as things go from bad to really bad. To get out of this quagmire, the president needs to take proactive steps (outlined coherently by Kerry) and then we need to change presidents.

That's the argument. Along the way, Kerry coherently lays out his rationale for voting to give the President the authority for military action in Iraq -- in effect, Congress was giving the President the "big stick" that Teddy Roosevelt spoke of, with the understanding that we would try first to speak softly, and only use the big stick after every other diplomatic effort had been exhausted. Kerry, at least, also believed that the President would internationalize the coalition; at the end of the day, however, he failed to do so, and as a result, 90% of the casualties have been Americans. A copy of the text of Kerry's speech is at salon.com [link]

So now you know what the speech says, roughly. Here's the coverage:

Salon.com put the speech on the front page of its website, along with a large picture of Kerry at NYU (with the word "Stronger" prominently displayed on the backdrop). At nytimes.com, the article is the second story, with the provocative "In Harshest Critique Yet, Kerry Attacks Bush Over War in Iraq". [link]. The third story at nytimes.com, by the way, is about the video of an American hostage being beheaded. Clearly, the Times and Salon both think this is an important speech.

Curiously, the speech doesn't rate front page coverage at cnn.com, even in the headliner section "Politics". The stories there are "CBS: Memos discredited" and "Campaigns agree to three debates". So much for CNN's supposed "liberal bias". Fox News Channel's website, meanwhile runs not once, but three times, the headline "Bush: Kerry's Waffling" (with a teaser that reads: "President accuses rival of leaving behind a trail of contradictory positions in Iraq"). Not surprisingly, Fox covers President Bush's decision to lift sanctions on Libya, and CBS's apology for being duped (with a subhead that a Kerry advisor supposedly met with CBS's source). It also runs on its front page a story about Democratic questioning of CIA Director nominee Porter Goss.

MSNBC.com mentions the Kerry speech on its front page ("Kerry Rips Bush Over Iraq"), although it buries the headline as a "related link" under a much larger headline about the hostage being beheaded. Still, MSNBC.com includes a video link, so they must think there's something there. Slate.com, a relative of MSNBC.com, also covers the story on the front page, with what is probably the best story on the speech. The article lays out, in 13 boldface headings plus commentary and quotes, what Kerry's position is, but unfortunately, the story is hidden in plain sight, as it were, under a snarky frontpage headline that suggests a direction that is the opposite of where the article actually goes ("Where Kerry Stands on Iraq: A Kerry-English Translation"). [link]

Other front page mentions come from washingtonpost.com, a buried headline at denverpost.com (under a large headline announcing the CBS apology), the Houston Chronicle (again, buried deep on the front page, below a headine that reads "Bush Defends Iraq Policy Amid Criticism"), and a second-level importance headline at the Chicago Tribune. (In the Trib's defense, there was "hard" news out of Illinois today, as a guard at the state capitol was shot and killed, but then again, Dan Rather got the biggest headline, and the capitol guard was second. Kerry's was below those two headlines, in the same type size as the guard story). The story also got front page coverage in the Des Moines Register ("Kerry Accuses Bush of Incompetence on Iraq").

Nothing on the front page of the Dallas Morning News (dallasnews.com).

Overseas, the story is front page material in France's Le Monde (no surprise there, is there?) ("John Kerry expose sa strategie pour sortir du "chaos" irakien"). Nothing on the front page of the London Times or the Independent, and mixed coverage on the BBC website -- the BBC uses a picture of Kerry speaking at NYU and offers excerpts of the speech, but under a headline that reads "Kerry and Bush Square Off on Iraq". Interestingly, the same story leads the BBC's Arabic language site. By contrast, no mention of Kerry's speech on Al Jazeera's front page, which I thought would have carried it.

Anyway, these are my findings on the subject. As usual, I don't have an explicit conclusion to draw from this -- many media outlets covered the speech more or less prominently, some didn't, and one (you know who you are, Fox News Channel) covered the story so misleadingly that I am wondering if we saw the same speech. Anyway, there you have it.

[A note about my methodology: first, this post is only accurate as of about 11:00 p.m. this evening, and is a non-scientific survey of major media outlets. The nature of internet news sites is that they change frequently, so I didn't bother linking to generic front pages as examples -- inevitably, they'll change. Nor did I make PDFs of front pages since I have neither the server bandwidth nor the storage space to link to them. All publications are named by some easy identifier, usually popular name, for ease of identification if you're interested in perusing that publication particularly and for ease of searching in Google. For foreign press, go to abyznewslinks.com, which has links to many international media outlets.]