Ed Wood "The Right Stuff" Published April 30, 2003

Winners and losers

There were definite winners and losers in the recent Iraqi struggle. The biggest winners, or course, were the people of Iraq, who for the first time in 35 years were set free from the bondage of what is proving to have been one of the most heinous dictatorships in recent history. Our armed forces were winners, as were their commanders, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Military Commander General Tommy Franks, and yes, President George W. Bush.

Losers included members of the Saddam regime, of course; His Excellency, Kofi Anon and the corrupt and ineffective United Nations organization; Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix and his crew of incompetents; Secretary of State Colin Powell, who proved totally ineffective in representing the U.S. position of wanting to free the people of Iraq; and of course, France, Germany and Russia.

But there were also clear winners and losers outside the military and political arenas. A clear winner, cable TV's FOX News, whose early morning program, "Fox and Friends" drew 2.9 million viewers in a recent survey, vs. 2.8 million for CBS's Early Show, even though CBS, being a broadcast network, had access to 10 times the potential viewers.

All through this momentous news event, the major network news organizations continued the slide that has cost them two-thirds of their viewers in the past 20 years! During the broadcast of the Iraqi War, CBS News viewership dropped 15 percent, ABC fell 6 percent, and NBC managed a meager 3 percent increase. Meanwhile the FOX News Channel grew by 236 percent!

The major networks' bias against the Iraq War became apparent as they continued their doom and gloom reporting, while cable channels made available on-site and unedited views of our tanks and armored personnel carriers speeding down Iraqi highways, virtually unchallenged, running over Saddam billboards and pulling down Saddam statues! We were able to compare for ourselves the networks' predictions of doom, while watching our military triumphantly rolling into and through Baghdad. We were able to simultaneously see the actual conflict, and hear the news anchor's interpretation of what we were seeing. And thus, many of us learned what we had suspected for a long time; not to place our confidence in the reporting of the major news anchors.

The trust we had in the Edward R. Murrows and the Walter Cronkites is gone forever. Now we want to see and interpret for ourselves. A new day in news reporting is upon us, never to return to the dominance of the Dan Rathers, the Tom Brokaws or the Peter Jenningses. Sorry fellows, we just can't believe you any more.

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Ed Wood is a resident of Sparta, TN. His column is published each Wednesday in the Crossville Chronicle. He can be contacted at edwd@blomand.net