By LAGAN SEBERT

On January 1st the front-page headline of The Tennessean read, “Wary World Greets 2003.” A sense of uneasiness permeated throughout the normally boisterous New Year celebrations of 2003. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the signing of the Patriot Act, the institution of color-coded terror alerts, and President Bush’s assertion that Saddam Hussein must be disarmed had a polarizing affect on much of the United States in the lead-up to the war with Iraq.

By early 2003 the initial post-9/11 culture of national unity was already beginning to break down. Few places was this more evident than Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville is a city with a complicated political make-up. Nashville’s congressional district has elected democratic politicians to the House of Representatives consistently since the 1870s, yet Tennessee has voted Republican in recent presidential elections. In the 2000 presidential elections Al Gore lost in Tennessee, his home state, to President Bush.

Nashville has the most places of worship per capita of any U.S. city and is known as the buckle of the Bible belt. Nashville is also the home of the largest Christian music and book publishers in the country. President Bush received strong support from Nashville’s large and powerful Christian community in the lead-up to the war yet many other liberal groups vocally opposed the war from the start. When President Bush visited Nashville a little more than a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq to speak at the National Association of Religious Broadcasters he was introduced with a bible verse saying, people rejoice when a righteous person rules but mourn when the wicked are in power: “Mr. President, as you can see, we are rejoicing,” yet anti-war protesters picketed outside.

Tennessee is known as the “Volunteer State,” the adage is printed across the state’s license plates. Patriotism and a history of responding to the call of duty during wartime are sources of pride for many Tennesseans. When the war began in 2003 there were almost 3,500 national guardsmen from Tennessee and over 20,000 troops from Fort Campbell, the army base located just north of Nashville, fighting in Iraq. Yet despite this history of patriotism the Iraq war has become a divisive issue in Nashville.

Among this culture the dominant regional paper The Tennessean chose to oppose the president’s policy of going to war regardless of international support from the United Nations. On the eve of the start of the war The Tennessean published an Editorial titled “Begin healing divisions created over Iraq now.”

President Bush should begin work on building peace after the war – not only in Iraq but with its allies around the world and with the citizens of this country…This newspaper has hoped that consensus could be reached in the Security Council so that if war was inevitable, Saddam would face an internationally sanctioned action….The White House also needs to acknowledge that many Americans deeply opposed military action against Iraq. Some, like this newspaper, have opposed war as a unilateral action. Others oppose it under any circumstance… With war, the future of Iraq and the threat of terrorism all upon us, unity is crucial.

The purpose of this paper is to examine The Tennessean’s coverage of the Iraq debate in the six weeks preceding the invasion on March 20, 2003, to determine if the paper fulfilled its journalistic function of providing its readers with the information they needed to make their own decisions on whether the United States should invade Iraq.

What’s The Charge?

Helen Thomas, the maverick political reporter who has covered every White House since the Kennedy administration, has said the U.S. news media went into a “coma” in the lead up to the Iraq War. In an article for The Nation magazine she wrote:
The naïve complicity of the press and the government was never more pronounced than in the prelude to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The media became an echo chamber for White House pronouncements…I honestly believe that if reporters had put the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush Administration’s war policies, they could have saved the country the heartache and the losses of American and Iraqi lives.

The charge that the U.S. news media failed to provide critical and incisive coverage in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 is by no means unique to Thomas. On January 13, 2003 the London paper The Guardian published an article titled, “Media: Bushwhacked: With war looming it is no good the American public looking to its newspapers for an independent voice. For, says Matthew Engel, the press have now become the president’s men.”

Now that the war has become an expensive and largely unpopular four-year conflict for the United States the view that the press failed in their pre-war coverage has become a widely popular belief. Leading newspapers The Washington Post and The New York Times apologized with mea culpas for providing insufficiently critical coverage in the lead-up to the war.

The Bush administration made repeated assertions and suggestions of a connection between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Editor & Publisher magazine conducted a survey of newspaper editors and reported that these claims went largely unchallenged. A report published by the Christian Science Monitor in the lead-up to war suggested that the Bush administration had in fact lead a successful publicity campaign to connect Saddam Hussein with the 9/11 attacks without being significantly challenged by the press. Polling data shows that directly after the 9/11 attacks only three percent of those polled thought Hussein was behind the attacks. But by April of 2003, 53 percent of respondents in a CBS/New York Times poll said Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the 9/11 attacks.

Another claim is that information that could have undermined the Bush administration’s official stances was ignored or not sufficiently emphasized.

One study claims the war in Iraq was primarily presented and described in terms of war strategy and weaponry use, with a strong emphasis on technical and operational details rather than on policy. Some have claimed that the U.S. press largely told stories through a perspective from inside the American troops.

Others claim that newspapers did not take on the disagreements between UN inspectors and U.S. officials as well as they could. John Walcott, Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Knight Ridder told Editor & Publisher shortly after the invasion began, “clearly, the reporting on this (weapons inspections) before the war may not have been critical enough…It is possible that we in the press made essentially the same mistakes that the intelligence community made – to extrapolate from what we learned in the 1990s from weapons inspectors about Iraq weapons programs, and not consider that Iraqi behavior might have changed.”

In the official mea culpa published by the New York Times the editors wrote, “articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”

Jon Wolfsthal, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told American Journalism Review in 2003 that many news organizations tended to hype the preliminary findings in the run-up to the war without first fully questioning the veracity of the information. He said news outlets, “tend to be more excited about events than warranted,” and added that journalists needed to include more background in their stories.”

The question behind much soul-searching in U.S. news media is, how much did press coverage (or lack of coverage) contribute to the public backing for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq without the support of the United Nations? The answer to this question is beyond the scope of this paper.

This paper looks at the some of the charges made against the U.S. news media in their pre-war coverage in order to analyze the veracity of these claims as applied to the Nashville-based newspaper, The Tennessean.

Press Failure and The Tennessean?

The Tennessean was founded in 1812 and joined the Gannett Company in 1979. The add rate is about $82 per column inch. The daily circulation is about 175,000 with a Sunday circulation of about 240,000. The paper enjoys dominance in much of the middle Tennessee region, with no other daily newspaper coming close to its circulation numbers.

The Tennessean has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1957 for editorial cartooning and another for its coverage of the coal industry in 1962. The 2007 Bivings report ranked The Tennessean’s Web site as the ninth best internet newspaper Web site citing the site’s blog-like feel and strong multimedia content.

Much of the coverage of the Iraq War that appeared in The Tennessean was written under the byline Tennessee News Service without a specific reporter attached. The Tennessee News Service is the byline given to articles written by reporters employed by the Gannett Company who write primarily for other papers besides for The Tennessean. Many of these reporters are Gannet correspondents who syndicate their work to many papers. A senior editor of the Tennessean, Deborah Fisher said that while Gannett reporters outside of Nashville provide a lot of the content for the paper, The Tennessean is free to pick stories from all of the wire services, and The Tennessean has complete editorial autonomy from Gannett Company.

The purpose of this paper is to look at The Tennessean’s coverage of the last six weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq and use content analysis techniques to address the questions below as they relate to The Tennessean.

1) Was the press comatose in the run-up to the Iraq war?

2) Was the war told through perspective of American troops?

4) Was news presentation pro-war?

5) Was The Tennessean critical of official pronouncements?

Front pages were analyzed for content regarding the war. Lead articles concerning Iraq were analyzed to determine if they predominantly featured content that positively reinforced the president’s position that the United States should invade Iraq regardless of international support from the U.N. This paper looks at the placement of articles as an indicator of which stories The Tennessean thought were most important. Section titles, placement of stories, and the layout of the paper were analyzed to determine how the information was presented to the readers of The Tennessean.

Editorials, letters to the editor, and special sections devoted to Iraq were considered in order to determine if The Tennessean helped create a healthy community conversation surrounding the war. This paper looks at where pro-war and anti-war letters to the editor were placed by the editors of The Tennessean in order to gauge public opinion in middle Tennessee and the editorial stance of The Tennessean.

This paper also examines the choice of wire stories by the paper and the paper’s own local coverage of the debate surrounding the war in Nashville. Special attention was paid to the coverage produced by the one local reporter who was embedded with U.S. troops in Kuwait during the lead-up to the war.

Research was conducted in the manner stated above, in order to give this paper a basis of statistics to ground the findings of this research.

Findings:

1) The Tennessean was most definitely not “comatose” in its coverage of Iraq.

2) Local news coverage in the lead-up to war that focused on the armed forces provided little big-picture analysis, but the coverage of the war debate in Nashville was both critical and probing.

3) Front-page stories and headlines concerning Iraq predominantly featured content that positively reinforced the president’s position more often than not.

4) There are a few examples of stories critical to the debate regarding Iraqi disarmament, which were not prominently presented in The Tennessean’s pre-war coverage.

The Tennessean was most definitely not “comatose” in its coverage of Iraq

In the 42 days leading up to March 20, 2003 the day the United States invaded Iraq, The Tennessean had an Iraq-related article on the front page 90 percent of the time. 57 percent of the time there were two or more Iraq related articles on the front page of the paper and 60 percent of the time the lead article of the paper was related to Iraq.

There were 11 editorials regarding Iraq. Seven of these editorials were overtly critical of president Bush’s policy of seeking war without the approval of the United Nations. In a February 15, 2007 editorial The Tennessean called a preemptive attack a departure from traditional American foreign policy, and said, “unity is crucial to defeating Saddam.” A few days later another editorial said, “in a democracy, public opinion matters…a nation needs more than military might to wage war. It needs strong allies and the support of its own people.” On March 9, 2003 an editorial said, “Bush talks about war as if it is inevitable, but what kind of war? One recorded as U.S. aggression against Iraq, or a war validated by the International community?” The Tennessean echoed this view roughly once a week until the beginning of the war.

On March 11, 2003 The Tennessean accused President Bush of a failure of transparency with the press based on his reluctance to hold press conferences where reporters were allowed to question him directly about his policies.

There were letters to the editor related to Iraq in all but two issues of The Tennessean in the 42 days before the war. In addition to this, there were three special full-page inserts titled, “Equal Time: Tennessee Talkback” where the entire page was dedicated to answering a specific question regarding the Iraq war through letters to the editor. In each case this forum was accompanied with a column from the controversial Nashville-based columnist Tim Chavez.

The first “Tennessee Talkback” was published on February 9, 2003 and was accompanied by a column from Tim Chavez titled “Bush is good president pursuing bad policy.” He referenced a survey conducted by The Tennessean which said that 61 percent of readers support going to war with Iraq with or without support from the United Nations. Chavez wrote, “there is not enough evidence to pursue an unprovoked war without U.N. approval.” Then he asks, “Should the United States go to war against Iraq, with or without U.N. support?” There are ten letters saying yes and eleven letters saying no. There are convincing arguments made on each side.

The second “Tennessee Talkback” gives begins with a column by Tim Chavez titled, “War in Iraq must not threaten free speech at home.” Then he asks, “Should the United States go to war without a second U.N. resolution?” There are eight letters answering yes and seven letters answering no.

The third “Tennessee Talkback” begins with a column by Tim Chavez titled, “Flag-waving, songs don’t give what troops need.” Then he asks, “Do pay and benefits pale against the sacrifice asked of troops?” There are six letters answering yes and seven letters answering no.

In the rest of the letters to the editor sections pro-war letters were printed first 52 percent of the time while anti-war letters were printed first 26 percent of the time, again suggesting that there were more pro-war sentiments in the Nashville community than anti-war. But almost every issue of The Tennessean analyzed in this research contained both pro-war and anti-war letters to the editor regardless of which one appeared first.

Local news coverage in the lead-up to war that focused on the armed forces provided little big picture analysis, but the coverage of the war debate in Nashville was both critical and probing.

Much of The Tennessean’s local coverage of the lead up to Iraq was told largely through the perspective of U.S. troops. In the six weeks preceding the war there were a total of 23 stories regarding Iraq on the front page of the paper written by local writers. Of these, 11 were written by Chantal Escoto, who was embedded with the 101st Airborne troops from Fort Campbell in Kuwait during the run-up to the war. Of the other nine, four were other stories written about the deployment of the 101st Airborne by other reporters, two were about local fear regarding terror threats and the other six were written about President Bush’s visit to Nashville and the heated debate over the war in Nashville.

Escoto had traveled with the 101st Airborne Division to Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan before she went was embedded with them on the lead-up to the war with Iraq in 2003. Her coverage from Kuwait in the lead-up to war focused on minute details of military life and told heartwarming and inspiring stories about soldiers. Escoto did not report on anything outside the Military bases in Kuwait. Her reports received positive feedback in the letters-to-the-editor section, consistently received prominent placement, and were frequently accompanied with sidebars and photo essays. Middle Tennessee photographer John Partiplo accompanied Escoto. Partiplo’s photos routinely appeared on the front page of The Tennessean as the lead image.

Some of Escoto’s front-page headlines from Kuwait were: “Security Duty Serious Business for 101st Airborne,” “Amenities Make Duty in Desert Bearable,” “Doc dispenses medicine, reassurance,” “Tennessean says country roots give confidence to be a sniper,” “Bold sergeant toughens up troops for war,” “Troops create new dishes for dining out,” “Soldiers baptized at Camp Pennsylvania,” and “Third Brigade brings together different men for perfect crew.”

Escoto’s first report from Kuwait ends, “Sandstorms are Fierce, Soldiers are Jewels.” The first line of her next report, “Amenities Make Duty in Desert Bearable”, begins, “the helicopters that will ferry them into battle have not arrived, but they have shoe polish.” The first line, which talks about the invasion of Iraq as if it was immanent, sits below a front-page picture of soldier shaving in desert. Another Escoto report, “Doc dispenses medicine, reassurance”, tells the story of an army medic in a chipper tone and ends with a cliché quote from the young medic: “life’s a journey, take a trip”.

Escoto’s series was accompanied by a segment where she asked 6 soldiers the same question and then The Tennessean ran the soldiers’ answers next to their picture. Questions ranged from, “what did you forget to bring from home?” to “which food you miss most?”

Other local stories about local deployments provided little more analysis to the situation. A lead story written as the 101st Airborne was deployed to the Middle East talked about the logistics of moving people and featured a quote near the top of the article from retired Lt. Gen. William “Gus” Pagonis saying, “What people don’t understand is we have the best trained army in the world…101st Airborne never fails to impress.” The rest of the article talked about what soldiers did while waiting for planes. Other prominent local reports regarding military deployment highlighted human stories about soldiers getting baptized, barbershops loosing business, and spouses preparing for war.

Local coverage of pro-war and anti-war rallies however produced probing reports on a community divided on the issue of the war in Iraq. When President Bush visited Nashville to speak at the National Religious Broadcasters convention The Tennessean featured a prominent story on its front page. The article’s sub-headline read, “Talk of war looms over visit.” A local was quoted in the article saying, “I sense a kind of schizophrenia, in which there is wonderful compassion…yet there is all this talk of destruction.”

When the parks department prohibited a local acting group from performing the Greek comedy Lysistrata, which has an anti-war theme, in Nashville’s Centennial Park, The Tennessean reported about it on the front page. The article reported how that the actors were prohibited from performing in the park because their play was “too political,” but noted that the park had recently hosted a pro-war rally where country singer Darryl Worley performed his new song “9/11, Have You Forgotten?” to an estimated 1,000 people. After a few reports on the subject the acting troop was allowed to perform Lysistrata in the park.

When an employee of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) was reportedly taking names at a “Books not Bombs” rally on Middle Tennessee State University campus The Tennessean reported about it on the front page as well. After the TBI destroyed its materials related to the event before they could be investigated The Tennessean reported on the legal implications. The Tennessean later criticized the TBI in an editorial titled “TBI – May be watching you but who’s watching TBI?”

A local radio personality Steve Gill organized an anti-France rally called, “Bash a Peugeut for Peace.” The Tennessean reported on the event and prominently featured photos of locals beating the French-made car with sledgehammers. The article told how Don McGehee a 79 year old WWII veteran who server in the south pacific theater took the first 7 swings on the car and quoted McGehee saying, “That felt good. It’s pretty good exercised, though I don’t know what it’s symbolic of.”

On March 4, 2003 The Tennessean ran a front-page article about how Iraq had become a divisive issue in the Nashville music community as well. The article states that while, “country radio seems to endorse war on Iraq, Nashville’s music community is as conflicted about the standoff as the rest of America.” Pro-war songs by Nashville artists such as Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The angry American),” and Daryl Worley’s “9/11, Have You Forgotten?” were high on the country charts, but Nashville musicians such as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, Lucinda Williams and Kathy Mattea all spoke out and sang songs opposed to war.

Front-page stories and headlines concerning Iraq predominantly featured content that positively reinforced the president’s position more often than not.

In the six weeks leading up to the war with Iraq, there were 25 lead stories concerning Iraq. Out of these lead stories this paper analyzed that 15 of these stories predominantly featured content that supported the position of President Bush that the United States should invade Iraq regardless of international support. In contrast, this paper analyzed that five of the lead stories predominantly featured content that challenged the position of the president.

While the most popular subject of lead stories was U.N. resolutions and diplomacy, many of these stories were primarily made up of official pronouncements from government officials with little dissenting opinion. An example of a lead story on the Topic of diplomacy that was considered to positively reinforce the position of President Bush is a report from February 27, 2003 with the headline, “Bush pushes vision of democracy in Iraq.” The large image on the front page of the same issue is of President Bush standing in front of 5 massive American Flags. The first half of the article is almost entirely made up of direct quotes from a speech the president made the day before regarding the need for the U.N. to support his position. In the second paragraph the article quotes Bush saying, “any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them…A new regime in Iraq would serve as a democratic and inspiring example of freedom to other nations in the region.” In the entire article there is only one small dissenting viewpoint from a French diplomat.

An example of a lead story that was considered to challenge the position of the president is a report from February 10, 2003 with the headline, “Inspectors see signs of Iraq yielding.” Weapons inspectors were quoted high in the article as saying the Iraqi government was seeing a change of heart and cooperating more.

Some of the other headlines from lead stories considered to be supportive of the president’s policy are, “Iraq Military Weaker than 1991,” “Capitol Braces for Attack,” “Fort Campbell: Soldiers prepare to head out,” “Saddam indicates he will defy U.N. order to destroy missiles,” and “Saddam Mocks Ultimatum.” In the story titled “Iraq Military Weaker than 1991,” there is a subhead to the story titled, “tanks ready to rumble.” A lead picture of a soldier holding a gun in front of the capitol accompanies the article with the headline “Capitol braces for attack”.

There are a few examples of stories critical to the debate regarding Iraqi disarmament that were not prominently presented in The Tennessean’s pre-war coverage.

On February 7, 2003 Charles J. Hanley, a senior Pulitzer Prize winning journalist working for the associated press, published a report, which began, “Iraqi officials on Friday took foreign journalists to missile assembly and test sites spotlighted in Colin Powell’s anti-Iraq U.N. presentation, to underscore the fact that the installations have been under U.N. scrutiny for months.”

On February 7, 2003 the headline for the lead story of The Tennessean reads, “Game is over” in large bold letters. On February 8, 2003 there is an article similar to the Hanley article, but this article was in the back pages of the news section. It talks about how inspectors were allowed to interview scientists and journalists were taken to the sites presented in Powell’s presentation. On the front page of The Tennessean on February 8, 2003 is the headline, “Country on high terror alert.” The front-page terror story lists possible targets of attacks, such as key infrastructure, government buildings, and water supplies among others.

On March 8, 2003 there was an article from the Los Angeles times on page six that quoted the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency saying that the letters between Iraq and Niger cited by President Bush and Colin Powel as evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were fake.

On March 13, 2003 there was a small article on the bottom of page nine about the FBI probing the possible forgery of the letters between Niger and Iraq. On the same day a dramatic image of soldiers training in Kuwait dominated the front page accompanied by a story with the headline, “Bold sergeant toughens up troops for war.”

Conclusions

Given the knowledge available to The Tennessean during the weeks before the war, the paper appeared fulfill its journalistic duty to inform the citizens of pertinent information. The claims made by Helen Thomas that the press was comatose during the run-up to war are unjustified in the case of The Tennessean.

While editorially the paper definitively positioned itself as being opposed to an invasion of Iraq without U.N. approval, the paper made an overt attempt to appear evenhanded in its opinion columns. Typically there was one pro-war or pro-bush opinion column and one anti-war or anti-bush column in the opinion section, almost all of which were written by columnists not from Tennessee.

The Tennessean’s most overt local critic of the war was Tim Chavez. Most of his columns relied on humor as a devise for criticism, which may reflect the timidity of the paper to overtly speak out against the war amongst a culture that was primarily supportive of President Bush’s policies.

On the question of presentation, the frequent prominent placement of stories supportive of war can largely be attributed to the lack of opposition being voiced within the government. It seems if anyone could be accused of being in a coma during the run-up to war the claim could be more justly directed at Washington politicians. When Tennessee Senator, Lamar Alexander voiced his concerns about the cost of rebuilding Iraq The Tennessean ran an article highlighting his doubts on the front page. There were very few reports concerning the war debate debate in congress in The Tennessean’s coverage of the weeks before the war.
One criticism this paper makes on the pre-war coverage of The Tennessean is that some of the military-focused stories by Chantal Escoto and other local writers should not have been placed as prominently as they were because they did little to further the debate on if the United States should invade Iraq.

It could be argued Escoto’s reports in the lead-up to the Iraq war was little more than free publicity for the U.S. armed forces under the guise of journalism. While her stories of local soldiers were popular and important to The Tennessean’s readership the prominent placement of her articles might have underscored the importance of other articles that contributed more to the debate.
A more serious charge can arguably be made toward the correspondents who filed stories for wire services, that in a lot of the wire articles regarding Iraq there could have been much more analytical coverage, historical context and critical investigations into official pronouncements and intelligence reports. This criticism does not.

The Tennessean ran a daily section titled “Iraqi Crisis” during the lead-up to war and changed this section’s title to “The Iraqi Conflict” two days before the war officially began.