Word: msnbc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...network nightly news dropped slightly. Cable showed a war that was easy to see but hard to know, as 24-hour news took advantage of technology and access but often hurriedly picked up unconfirmable reports, albeit with caveats. "It's a hazard of the electronic-journalism game," says msnbc president Erik Sorenson. "My staff is so sick of me saying the word attribution." There is always the fog of war, but like smog trapped by a heat inversion, it was compounded by hot air, as anchors vamped to fill time and pushed guests to speculate. If anything, the fog grew...
...advances and setbacks and in which war is a quagmire if it threatens to last as long as a season of The Bachelor. Yet TV also had fine moments, many, not coincidentally, when anchors and talking heads shut up, as with a fire fight in Baghdad that aired on msnbc last Thursday. For several chaotic minutes there were no voice-overs, charts or speculation, just the sound of spent shells clinking on concrete and the sights of G.I.s ducking behind walls, blood soaking into a soldier's pant leg. It was war, simple and unspun. Then the talking heads returned...
...camera, that gave away his unit's location. (In Afghanistan, Rivera had reported that he was at the site of a friendly fire incident that occurred miles away, so knowing where he was was an improvement.) And Peter Arnett, a legendary war correspondent under contract with NBC News and MSNBC, gave an interview to Iraqi state TV in which he obsequiously praised the "courtesy" of Iraqi information ministers, opined that the original coalition war plan had "failed" because of Iraqi resistance and said reporting of civilian casualties had aided the antiwar movement...
...what extent "maintaining morale" is a synonym for "not ticking off the viewers." Arnett's crime was that he "created a perception" of bias, to use the standard weasel words. Worse, he created a perception of the opposite bias from that which, as is clear to anyone with sight, MSNBC wants to convey. The network flies a flag in its lower left-hand corner and uses the military's name for the war, Operation Iraqi Freedom, to brand its coverage. Those also happen to be two on-screen signatures of Fox News, the vocally patriotic network that has continued...
Patriotism pays. So Fox and MSNBC dueled over who was the greater quisling. Fox produced an attack-style ad highlighting Arnett's interview; MSNBC aired a spot (complete with flag) that promised, "We will not compromise military security or jeopardize a single American life," an apparent dig at Rivera. Even CNN (like TIME, a unit of AOL Time Warner) was defensively asserting that it was no Mata Hari. During a live report from Walter Rodgers with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, outside Baghdad, anchor Carol Costello prompted, "Walter, just to clarify for our audience, everything you're telling...