Interesting take on the main topic of the thread from WSJ Europe – an editorial comparing coverage of the election from Europe vs. Arab media coverage.
Europe’s Left in Denial
February 1, 2005
The European left’s attempts at damage control came right away. Just hours after the scenes viewed around the world of joyous and determined Iraqis defying terrorists by casting their votes, Germany’s Social Democratic parliamentary group sent out a press release with the following headline: “Iraq elections: A good step but no retroactive justification for the war.”
It says much about the decline of Germany’s left (and Europe’s for that matter) that the removal of a fascist dictator and the spread of democracy cannot be considered a worthy end in itself – at least not if the dictator is Arab and the liberators American.
The same bias runs through much of Europe’s media. According to a common narrative, nothing good could possibly come out of this “illegitimate” war. But that their ideological zeal to uncritically condemn American policy surpasses that of Arab media surely should be cause for some introspection.
Media-Tenor, a media analysis center headquartered in Bonn, Germany, studied the Iraq election coverage of 41 main European media outlets in Germany, France, the U.K., Spain and Italy between Jan. 17 and Jan. 26. The analysis compared this with 12 leading Arab TV stations and newspapers. Specifically, the researchers looked at how the journalists presented the legitimacy of the elections. The results “even stunned our Arab researchers,” Markus Rettich, director of political studies at Media Tenor, told us.
“European media portray a dramatic picture ahead of the elections in Iraq. The legitimacy of the election is strongly questioned. Almost no positive Iraqi sources are quoted,” Media Tenor writes.
The Arab media, on the other hand, “make significantly fewer skeptical statements regarding the legitimacy of the elections in Iraq. In contrast to the Europeans, the Arab coverage quotes more Iraqi sources. As far as legitimacy is concerned, Al Jazeera & Co. seem to be reporting about a different election,” Media Tenor concludes.
During the observation period, ambivalence or outright negative reporting about the legitimacy of the election always topped at least 60% of the European coverage. In the Arab media, positive reporting about the legitimacy usually topped 60% and sometimes was even 100%.
In Germany, the coverage appeared particularly biased. Nearly 80% of the reports regarding the legitimacy was negative in the coverage of ARD and ZDF, the two main state-funded broadcasters, which produce the “most-trusted” news shows. “The trend of the reports from ARD and ZDF correspond to the extremely one-sided pattern of reporting that we have observed since [Chancellor Gerhard] Schr?der’s change of his U.S. policy in the final phase of the 2002 German general elections,” Media Tenor editor-in-chief Roland Schatz said in a press release. “The media present the German public with a situation in Iraq that is twice as negatively portrayed as the one under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.”
“As long as the same daily topic is offered from Baghdad, the viewers cannot come to an independent judgment about what has been achieved in Iraq,” Mr. Schatz said.
We can add to this from our own observation of the media in Germany and beyond. French-state owned TF1, for example, Sunday made much of a report from Amman in which a German diplomat was complaining of “irregularities” and absence of monitors. As Michael Rubin wrote on these pages yesterday: “Judging an Iraqi election from Amman is the geographical and political equivalent of monitoring an American poll from Havana.”
Some European media are struggling today to reconcile this incredible display of courage and yearning for democracy by the Iraqi people with the distorted picture they have been painting of supposedly abject American failure in Iraq. The shock in some quarters is not unlike that which followed the re-election of President Bush. The inability to predict or even contemplate Mr. Bush’s victory stemmed from the same type of ideological bias that “informed” much of Europe’s Iraq coverage.
Then as now some are still in denial. “Americans are stupid,” was Europe’s verdict as the results came in Nov. 2. Surely there must be an equally facile answer to why Iraqis risked their lives to vote. Given a little time, someone in Europe will come up with it.
