antiwar voices

In the wake of the NYT military analysts story, we're paying more attention to who was allowed on tv in 2002-3. Kevin Drum provides an alaysis done by some cats at Syracuse ("Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq"):

The data flatly contradict the claim that dissenting views were "shut out" of news coverage....When the two networks are aggregated together, the distribution of source quotes is 34% supportive, 35% neutral, and 30% opposed.

What a relief! But wait. It turns out that virtually all of the supportive quotes came from the Bush administration (no surprise) while nearly all of the opposed quotes came from....

Foreigners. Yep. Despite the fact that plenty of Democratic politicians and U.S. experts opposed the war, the news networks almost completely shut off domestic sources of criticism...

There's a chart of who's in what category. So it's mostly Iraqis, UN nerds, etc. who presented the case against the war. Helpful? Hardly.

Needless to say, relying on Saddam Hussein, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan to be the almost exclusive face of the anti-war movement is even worse than ignoring it. As the authors say blandly, "It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration's motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans' perceptions of Saddam Hussein's arguments about why war was a bad idea."

And the American public says... La la la, I'm not listening.