Today at the top of Meet The Press:
"Day 26 of the fighting in Lebanon and Israel. Is there any end in sight? Day 1,236 of the war in Iraq. Is the U.S. in the middle of a civil war?"
Okay, besides the whole making-the-Iraq-civil-war-into-a-question thing (paging Donald Rumsfeld!), this was a straight-ahead comparison: days of one conflict vs. days of another. A pretty shocking comparison because for all the horror and loss and tragedy of the Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon battle, it's been going for less than a month. The war in Iraq has been going for over THREE YEARS with no sign of abatement, and certainly no timetable for same. So: 26 - 1,236, a straight-ahead comparison. Moving on.
On CNN this afternoon* on "This Week At War": "Next, when we turn to Iraq, and this question: can Iraqi forces control the spiralling sectarian violence, or is Iraq at the tipping point to a full-scale civil war? But first, a look at the human cost of the conflict in Iraq and across the Middle East."
And then they show this graphic:
There are so many problems here I don't know where to start.
Let's start with the framing. First of all, YES, media friends, Iraq IS in a civil war. Turning it into a question minimizes the violence there. But here, minimizing the violence in Iraq is the name of the game. The setup: "A look at the human cost of the conflict in Iraq and across the Middle East." And then the straight-ahead comparison of numbers....for the past week, that is. Across the top of the screen, under "WAR FATALITIES" in large type, is the date: July 12 - Aug. 4. But the lead in specifically spoke to "the human cost of the conflict in Iraq" - and the numbers as they follow list the civilian dead as 683 - 650 for Israel/Hezbollah and Iraq respectively. Dates notwithstanding, it is at best a mixed message and at worse horribly misleading.
This doesn't even include the fact that there has been no breakdown of those numbers. Iraqi civilians are all, literally, Iraqi civilians, even enmeshed as they are in a civil war (yeah, I said it). But of those 683 civilians, how many are Lebanese? How many are Israeli? Then look at the comparison of soldiers dead: 45 Israel, 400 Hezbollah. How does this compare to the civilian breakdown - it could mean that Israel is shelling the hell out of Lebanon or it could mean that Israel is only targeting Hezbollah forces and Hezbollah is launching rockets into Israel willy-nilly. The point is, those numbers have meaning that is totally stripped in this graphic, which has now created a misleading comparison between Israel and Hezbollah on one hand while not differentiating between them on the other, and meanwhile has slapped it next to statistics on Iraq that at first glance are suggestive of representing the entire conflict and certainly not reflective of how they were introduced on air.
(NB: Presumably the civilian total cited for Israel/Lebanon does not include data from Haifa, where we learn in a breaking news report immediately following this segment that a "barrage" of rockets has just rained down from Hezbollah).
Yes, it's true, the program is called "This Week At War" and the dates are written clearly on the screen. That said, it IS misleading. How do I know? I found out about it from someone who was misled: I got a phone call from a friend scratching her head and wondering how it was possible that the civilian tolls could be so similar. I was confused too and informed her that no, that wasn't possible. She said that she'd just seen it on CNN, at which point I asked her to rewind, press pause, and tell me exactly what was on the screen. Only then did she realize that the numbers referred to a specific month-long period.
CNN isn't stupid — they know how their graphics are read, and how much information people can take in over the few seconds that a chart is up onscreen. The conflict in the Middle East is complicated enough — CNN should be trying to make it helping to make the information more clear, not less.
*This anchor is not John Roberts - I recognize but can't name him, and can't ferret out his name anywhere. Help would be appreciated.
**Yes, yes, I know that Fox has been misleading as well. Suffice to say, there is a lot of coverage and a lot of it isn't so great.
