IT IS A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT

The Media Research Center, an organization dedicated to "documenting, exposing, and neutralizing liberal media bias," released a report May 12 lamenting that the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib have received more network news coverage than the mass graves full of Saddam Hussein's victims, unearthed in 2003 and 2004. There were vastly more news stories on the prisoner abuses than the unearthing of mass graves; this stands, with little further commentary, as obvious proof of bias:

To illustrate a fraction of the bias problem, we counted the number of prisoner-abuse stories on NBC’s evening and morning news programs (NBC Nightly News and Today) from April 29, when the story emerged, through May 11. There were 58 morning and evening stories. Using the Nexis news-data retrieval system, we counted the number of stories on mass graves found in Iraq from the reign of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and 2004. The number of evening and morning news stories on those grim discoveries? Five.

The MRC's lucid conclusion?

There is a vast difference between sexual humiliation and brutal murder. But to the national media, there is also much greater outrage for U.S. prisoner abuse than there is for the enemy’s murders. Viewers received a false picture of moral equivalence, with only American offenses amplified.

I came upon this data through some well-meaning debate folks over at Net Benefits (check out the "mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners" thread if you're interested). However, the mark of good debaters and good debate coaches (and more importantly, the mark of good political analysts) is the ability not merely to throw pieces of evidence at an audience, but to analyze that evidence, even above and beyond the often shallow self-analysis submitted by the source of the evidence in the first place.

In this case, unfortunately, that analysis was lacking. Let me offer some of my own:

1. With few exceptions, the entire world already knew Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The "outrage" these well-meaning proponents of "balanced news" insist upon had already manifest itself for several years. There was nothing new about the news that mass graves had been unearthed; this news was merely the verification of something we knew all along.

2. The political implications within the United States, of revelations of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib far outweighs the domestic (U.S.) political implications of Saddam's murderous past. No U.S. political or military leaders stood to lose their jobs based the (admittedly horrific, but, again, well-established) news that Saddam was an evil, murderous dictator. No U.S. soldiers will go on trial over the latter revelation. No U.S. leaders' credibility was on the line.

3. Those who did try to exploit the revelation of Saddam's mass graves to the end of somehow establishing legitimacy for the U.S. invasion of Iraq were, let's be frank, changing the initial justification for going to war against Iraq. The "outrage" they were seeking (an outrage easily found in the hearts of anyone who despises murderous dictators) was a very unique, functional outrage in their minds: They hoped such outrage would eclipse the questions about inconsistencies in U.S. intelligence reports, distorted and exploited by a war-hungry administration for the purpose of gaining public support for a dubious case for war.

4. In one case (the Abu Ghraib revelations), news reports revealed a scandalous inconsistency between the way U.S. troops have been represented by the Bush administration, and the reality that at least some military personnel have been behaving. In the other case (Saddam's mass graves), no inconsistencies were revealed. Again, we have known for years that Saddam was murdering a lot of people. No misrepresentations have occurred; only nutcases would have denied Saddam's evil ways.

In short, seeing fewer news stories about mass graves than about prisoner abuses can only lead to the MRC's conclusions if one looks at that quantitative comparison from the most shallow lens possible--one that asks us to believe that someone, somewhere, is making the argument that prisoner abuse is worse than mass murder. What an incredible insult to our intelligence. What an inexcusable implication about our moral vision.

The same goes for the rather reactionary argument that the prisoner abuse story has received more coverage than the tragic murder of Nicolas Berg. Both stories have been in rotation for several days now, and any attempt to establish one as more "covered" than the other is little more than a tasteless exercise in quantitative reductionism. The bigger story, of course, is which interests are trying to deploy which story (or stories), and to what ends.

In fact, those with genuinely critical and comprehensive moral vision would be asking even bigger questions, using this nonsensical MRC argument as a springboard to ask the most obvious one:

How much news coverage do murderous dictators elicit when those dictators have been historically supported by the United States government--dictators such as: P.W. Botha of South Africa...Fulgencio Batista of Cuba...Sani Abacha of Nigeria...the Duvaliers of Haiti...all the kings of Saudi Arabia...Spain's Franco...Turgut Ozal of Turkey...the Shah of Iran...General Pinochet of Chile...??? The list goes on...and that list includes Saddam Hussein prior to 1990. Saddam committed some of his most atrocious crimes in the 1980s with the full knowledge of U.S. officials (including Rumsfeld and Cheney), and you can bet your Aunt Fanny there was neither extensive U.S. media coverage, nor moral disgust on the part of any right wing media watchdog groups for said lack of coverage.

So my concluding question is: If groups like the MRC, and well-meaning self-styled "moderates" at Net Benefits, are so angry at the current manifestation of "selective outrage," why does their own outrage seem so incredibly selective? And why does it come at the expense of any attempt to examine the differences between those contingencies that feed media coverage of any given set of atrocities? For an answer, those folks may want to examine their own agendas before claiming to know the agendas of others.