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Foreign Policy In The Middle East: Do Campaign Concerns Reflect News Coverage?
by Hamad Al-Tourah, posted November 13, 2007
Current American press coverage of issues that concern the Middle East leading up to the 2008 presidential elections is more likely to be presented in the context of the current presidential campaigns, than they are as important foreign events. A survey of the five leading newspapers in the United States – the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times –reveals that coverage of presidential hopeful’s foreign policy concerns in the Middle East does not reflect regular coverage of Middle East conflicts. Instead, the media displays a subtle bias when it frames key events with an emphasis on how they concern changing domestic foreign politics and neglect other developments in the region if they do not factor into such national concerns.
The survey takes into consideration the relevant results from two separate avenues of research. The first is a record of the top 130 stories in the Middle East/World News sections in each of the five publications, spanning from September 7-November 9, 2007. The second modifies this search by including the terms “presidential” and “campaign” alongside “Middle East.” This query returned far less results across all the publications representative sites, so twenty of the top stories were scanned and compared with the first pool of data on general Middle East coverage. Though the pool was smaller, this second study showed that there was a much larger frequency of terms returned that included Iran, Iraq and Israel – all issues ruling primary debate points on the Middle East and foreign policy.
When pursuing the first avenue of research, the primary search results appearing under “Middle East”, two newspapers stood out from others in their coverage of the Iraq war. Of the 130 stories surveyed in The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, 35% from USA Today made reference to the Iraq war and insurgencies while 47% of those references appeared in The Los Angeles Times. This stands in contrast to the 15% of stories with these references in both The New York Times and The Washington Post, with a 13% coverage of the same issues in The Wall Street Journal.
Articles considering Iran in the Middle East sections overlapped frequently with news on Iraq (“Iran is intervening now in a united Iraq”). and hover over a range of concerns from terrorism and national security to the question of Kurdish communities to worry over Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s associated concern that “Iran could have nukes soon." These issues appeared evenly across all five publications, with no radical variation or shift in frequency from one publication to the next. The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times mentioned Iran in 14% of their stories, while The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal made reference to Iran in 15% and 13% of their stories, respectively. USA Today came out with the least coverage on Iran, with 10%. While the stories tend to intertwine Israel, Iran and Iraq, they represent a more diverse array of concerns associated with U.S. - Iranian tensions in an international forum, concerns that are largely ignored in the second pool of data.
Coverage of the Democratic and Republican primaries reveals that the importance of these two key countries and the issues surrounding them receive more coverage than in the wider news reports on the region. Combined coverage of Iran, Iraq and Israel in campaign stories in The Washington Post amounted to 70% of the articles, 60% in The New York Times, 68% in The Los Angeles Times, 67% in USA Today and 67% in The Wall Street Journal. This data shows that all five publications give equal emphasis to the three keywords when compared to the previous survey, suggesting a kind of consensus about the importance of these foreign affairs issues to domestic politics (see graphs). When we isolate these terms, Iraq and Iran increase more in the campaign articles than in their Middle East sections. All publications, except The Wall Street Journal, mentioned less frequently those issues directly relating to Israel than what had appeared in their Middle East sections. This suggests that such media outlets do not see the issue of Israel as critically influencing domestic politics, allowing us to limit our analysis of these stories and their influence on domestic politics with special regard only to those stories that take into account Iran and Iraq. 
The difference in coverage trends, with more emphasis being placed on Iran and Iraq, reveals a larger media trend to cut off surpluses in Middle Eastern coverage in order to focus on those regional developments that most directly affect domestic political issues. As public attention shifts onto the primary debates, the editorials show a bigger concern for deciphering debate tactics and forecasting the keys to a certain candidate’s success. A New York Times commentary from Frank Rich discusses the dramatic turning point in the October 20 Democratic debates when Clinton was questioned on her vote for the Kyl-Lieberman agreement, the vote made her “the only Democratic candidate who has not said a firm no to Bush policy…If Mr. Bush actually does make a strike against Iran, Mrs. Clinton will be the only leading Democrat to have played a cameo role in enabling it.” Howard Kurtz, in a Washington Post editorial, feels the need to bring up Iran as an example of a “key fault line in the Democratic race as Clinton’s opponents seek to slow her momentum.” These two examples illustrate just one way in which news items are brought up in commentary on the presidential campaigns without any real attention to their significance to the region itself. The debate over Iran isn’t so much a debate about foreign policy. Instead, references to Iran outside of the presidential debates comment on debate tactics, problematic issues for particular candidates and their affect on party dynamics. In a similar instance, a story about Iraq recycled among The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today was included in our query because of its association with evangelical support for hopeful Rudy Giuliani. In the articles, Giuliani garners support for Pat Robertson after placing himself on the front of fighting terrorist against “Islamofascists.” The article largely discusses how the separate parties will handle the new dynamic, where they will differ over Iraq in the front against a national security “threat, with Republicans more likely to blame radical Islam and Democrats speaking more generally about terrorism.” A USA Today article with the headline, “Televangelist Pat Robertson Endorses Rudy Giuliani”, assesses evangelical support for Giuliani in relation to the three key terms discussed in the survey data. “Giuliani rejected the idea of a U.S. pullout from Iraq, said Iran should be denied the chance to become a nuclear power and proclaimed Israel a ‘faithful ally’ of the United States.” A number of the articles featuring Iraq among all the nationally syndicated publications recycle terms like Iraq, Iran and Israel in discussions of bipartisan politics rather than pointed solutions to foreign policy issues brought up both in the news media and in the presidential debates.
David Dunford, a former U.S. Ambassador to Oman, Saudi Arabia and professor for the Middle Eastern Department at The University of Arizona, finds no surprise in the results of the poll findings. “Does the media ignore what’s going on in the Middle East? The answer is yes, they largely do. But they do that because they don’t believe that the American public will really care about the other issues.” While presidential debates take up all the issues surrounding Iran and Iraq, the media barely attempts to follow up or flesh out foreign policy concerns that draw on other stories in the region. Once the ball starts rolling on presidential debates, “the candidates feed off what the media reports and the media feeds off what the candidates do.” One way that this press-candidate dialogue is perpetuated is the attention to polls that gauge public opinion, even though “most people who have done a good job at assessing the media know that the polls are a very superficial way to assess public opinion.”
This is the busiest time of the year for Jim Norman, the polling editor at USA Today. At this time of the year, “the presidential election, the Iraq war, the issue of Iran right now” are among the top news items for which they provide polls because they are “volatile… sensitive enough to pick up the changes…when there was a real shift in the electorate.” A review over the polls taken since the beginning of the survey period, September 7, validates his claim and shows that the top two polls taken were over Iraq and Iran. Since then, there have been 31 nationally syndicated polls disseminated about Iraq, with 13 about Iran. This could provide just one explanation for why USA Today lead all other newspapers in coverage on Iraq, especially considering his own opinion that the paper “uses as many, more polls than any other paper…and report a news item on the polls.” Their high volume of polls regarding the two issues correlate to an Economist survey on the most widely divided issues in the United States being the Iraq war and the importance of terrorism, that issue that had been linked in the detailed articles to Iran, Iraq and the spread of Islamofascism. What accounts for the decline in Israel’s presence during the campaigns? “Israel has been always been domestic political issue,” Dunford suggests, indicating how it has been normalized across the political spectrum. The coverage of foreign news items in the United States during the early 2008 presidential primaries isn’t so much determined by what appears in foreign news circuits so much as how widely they influence the character of the political landscape and influence shifting domestic partisan politics during early election stages.
Sources
Atkin, Charles K. "The Impact of Polling on the Mass Media." AAPSS 472(1984): 119-128.Dunford, David. Phone Interview. 12 November 2007.
Norman, Jim. Phone Interview. 12 November 2007.
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, Nov 14 2007, 6:06 AM EST
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