On fairness, bias in war reporting

I was in Egypt when the war started and spent quite a bit of time in the hotel watching all the television channels available: BBC, CNN, a German channel, a French channel, the Egyptian news hour in English and several Arabic-language channels.

From this, I wanted to confirm something Howard Rosenberg suggested (“Snippets of the ‘Unique’ Al Jazeera,” April 4), even though he was only able to see the Al Jazeera channel by itself, a week after the conflict started. Being able to flip back and forth between channels revealed how differently CNN approached the conflict from the rest of the world.

In comparison to what else I was seeing, CNN really did seem like a video game. It was all focused on technology. They were either showing fancy graphics of the ground, abstracted; footage of equipment like helicopters, aircraft carriers, night goggles, and how they worked; or distant shots of buildings flaring up as bombs hit them. In contrast, all the Arabic-language stations showed human beings almost continuously.

It was very eerie to switch from the green shots of CNN to long pans of people in hospitals, people weeping on the streets, people carrying coffins, people working in shops, as well as extensive interviews with very scared-looking American soldiers and long pans of dead American and British soldiers on the ground.

This will be the strongest memory I carry away from my hours of watching: As Americans, we no longer seem human or connected to the human. While the rest of the world still thinks a human being more interesting than a burning building, our leaders protest when we are shown the only real consequences of the war that any human being should care about: the dead and wounded from both sides, and the tremendous grief of those left behind.

Wendy Belcher

Culver City

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IT’S about time for someone to show the American public that we have got to stop the double standard that seems to have become the widely accepted norm in the news these days.

How rightfully outraged we became when we saw U.S. POWs shown on TV ... and how the showing of Iraqi POWs on every U.S. news station as well as in newspapers (yes, The Times too) did not raise an eyebrow only a couple of days earlier. How prompt we are to condemn the Iraqis for not fighting “fair” ... and yet we seem to think it is completely fair to invade a country and bomb them with more powerful weapons than they could ever defend themselves against.

Yes, Al Jazeera is biased, but certainly not more biased than Fox (which dared call cluster bombs “clean and precise” bombs!), or CNN, for that matter. We are numb because we are used to gobbling up whatever information the regular stations feed us. We don’t question it. We are just so used to dismissing everyone who is not of the same mind as us as “cowards,” “enemies” or “ungrateful, cheese-eating monkeys” that we have lost all perspective and objectivity.

Patricia Bartoli-Berti

Los Angeles

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NOTHING amazes and impresses me as much as a liberal who is shocked -- shocked! -- at the success of Fox News (“Objectivity Is Lost to Fox News’ Barbs,” by Howard Rosenberg, April 11). Most liberal commentators ignored the growing success of Fox News, despite all evidence to the contrary, and indeed routinely dismissed Fox News as a short-term aberration that would not succeed. The fact remains that Fox News could only achieve success in a very crowded market because there is an audience willing to make a choice as to which outlet to watch, and that then exercises its inherent right to make that choice.

I would think most liberals would be pleased that so much diversity of thought and opinion -- and, yes, bias -- exist in news reporting today compared with 30 years ago. True, the airwave monopoly that many liberal-leaning stations enjoyed for a long time may be slipping, but that is only because of one factor: There is a very strong and solid audience that wants a Fox News approach, biased or not, and that is no longer willing to accept CNN or the Big Three as the agents of reporting.

Richard P. Burgoon Jr.

San Diego