War Weariness
Does public opinion affect the focus and judgement of media coverage, or ultimately is it the other way around and do the newspapers largely influence what people believe?
It is an interesting question, and personally I am more inclined to believe that it’s the latter – that the print and broadcast media can and do often sway the beliefs of the general populace.
Take the report delivered by US General David Petraeus in Washington this morning on the effectiveness of the military troop surge implemented by President Bush. In his report General Petraeus commented that the objectives of the surge were largely being fulfilled, though further time would be needed for a better analysis.
I must say, in depth the report did not particularly interest me, as is no doubt the case for many other people. What was of interest was not necessarily facts and figures, but the overall picture that was painted. Was the surge working: yes or no? The answer seemed to be yes, it was.
Yet, as I watched the broadcast media’s coverage on General Petraeus’ report; that of Sky, ITV and the BBC, I was left with the distinct impression that even before it had been delivered, the journalists had set out to find fault with it from the beginning and to claim that it ‘did not represent the situation on the ground’, as one ITV reporter put it, because it did not fit their world view.
As with all reports of this type, there are good sides and bad sides; achieved targets and failures. The same was true of the Petraeus analysis. However, can you have imagined the response if the report had said the surge had been a strategic failure? Would the BBC for example, have been extolling to its license fee paying audience about some of the benefits the surge had achieved in Iraq? Of course not, their whole coverage would have been completely and utterly and entirely negative.
The print media’s analysis of the surge in tomorrow’s papers will merely reflect the latest episode in the ongoing saga of how public opinion on British military operations in the Middle East has slowly shifted over the intervening years – from initially being on the whole supportive or indifferent to now becoming increasingly negative.
When the Iraq war began, there were people who were strongly for and against it. However, one way or another many people did not really care about the conflict in Iraq. Yet, over the months and years, when bombarded by a constant and daily stream of negative anti-war, guilt-tripping media reports, then attitudes changed.
Much of that initial indifference has been turned into anger, annoyance and weariness at the seemingly never ending struggle. But would that weariness have been evident if the media had been positive about the Middle Eastern conflicts? Probably not.
