Communications and Media

In Embedding the Truth A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War, the authors main argument is two-fold one, that television news programs are based on historical American norms of objectivity in journalism and two, that while television news programs claim objectivity in their programming there are in fact significant differences amongst news channels in terms of how stories are presented and which stories are getting told (Aday, Livingston, and Herbert 10). The authors use a month long study they conducted in which they examined the nightly newscasts of six different news channels, including five American channels as well as Al Jazeera. The timeline of the study covered the beginnings of the Iraq war through the toppling of the status of Saddam Hussein Baghdad, signaling the end of his regime.

The authors argue that this study is broader in scope than similar studies due to the extended period of time as well as their focus on both individual stories and the overall representation of the war. The results of the study showed that while the American news networks (with the exception of Fox News Channel) had a generally neutral tone to their stories, at FNC (where roughly 60 percent of the stories were coded as neutral) and Al Jazeera (where 89 of the stories were coded as neutral) the unbalanced stories fell along cultural lines, with FNC running more pro-war stories and Al Jazeera running more critical stories (Aday et al. 16-17).

The main arguments of the article are against both the idea that news organizations are inherently neutral and objective in their reporting, and that there is no substantive difference between the stories being told by, for example, ABC and FNC. They found that FNC had a more positive approach to the war as well as more stories about individual battles, technology, and Quoting Dewey, Carey notes that Society exists not only by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication (qtd. in Carey 14).

According to Douglas Kellner, cultural texts need to be analyzed within their production systems, what he calls the political economy of culture (12). In his own television studies, wherein he established that the mergers and takeovers of television networks in the 1980s led to a news culture that was generally supportive of Reaganism, Kellner determined that the study of political economy can help determine the limits and range of political and ideological discourses and effects (13). In Aday et al, there was a narrow focus on the stories being told by television news networks, without the context that Kellner refers to. Careful scrutiny and evaluation of the political economy of news media in general and at the individual networks under discussion would have added weight to their thesis. The encouragement for reporters to use the first person plural (our troops, etc.) by the upper echelons of Fox News Channel is an example of the type of political economy that Kellner invokes, but this is tossed into the conclusion to Aday et als article (18). A more consistent focus on these types of facts would have greatly contributed to an understanding of the nodes of communication at work in news programming.

If communication is a process, where reality is at least partially constructed, than
When this process becomes opaque, when we lack models of and for reality that make the world apprehensible, when we are unable to describe and share it when because of a failure in our models of communication we are unable to connect with others, we encounter problems of communication in their most potent form (Carey 33-34).

It could be said that FNC and CNNs Lou Dobbs Show, the anchors and journalists were participating in a ritual view of communication, defined as being directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs (Carey 18). Aday et al remark that this kind of reinforcement of previously held ideas, as in the case of FNC, which has a prowar audience and also runs more prowar stories than the other networks, is a possible area for future communications research. This is another potential place for an expansion of the findings of the study. The economy of news networks could have implications on the kinds of stories being told, in that the networks are ultimately responsible to their shareholders and audience members. FNC has created a feedback loop of news stories that will please its audience, which creates a more and more specific audience that tunes into FNC for these types of stories, creating an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order that operates to provide not information but confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds but to represent an underlying order of things (Carey 19).

This article touches on numerous topics in communication communication as ritual or transmission, the idea of mainstreaming, and the use of consensus cues in news media are all implicated in Aday el als research (18). In addition, as one of the early articles on the effect of embedded journalists during wartime, this article serves as an important touchstone for future communications research in this area. The authors found that, while the differences in reportage between embedded and unilateral reporters in Iraq was relatively minor, embedded reporters focused more on individual soldiers and less on Iraqi casualties and civilians. If embedding reporters indeed becomes standard military practice in future conflicts, studying the effects of this method of reporting should prove to be a fruitful field for communications scholars.