The Media's Coverage of Iraq: Scott Ritter vs. Dennis Halliday

November 17, 1998
by Ali Abunimah

Following I present the results of a survey of coverage I did to compare how much media coverage former UNSCOM arms inspector Scott Ritter got, versus former UN humanitarian relief coordinator Dennis Halliday.

Why compare the two?

Both Ritter and Halliday are UN officials who resigned their posts and severly criticized some aspects of UN policy in Iraq. Ritter resigned because he thought that the UN was not being sufficiently tough with Iraq which, he said was still hiding weapons of mass destruction; Halliday resigned in protest at sanctions, which he said were killing 6-7000 Iraqi civilians per month, and were counterproductive.

The experiment:

I did a Lexis-Nexis search of for the terms "Ritter AND Iraq," and "Halliday AND Iraq" in the two weeks from November 2-16 1998. I also did a search for the terms in the ten day period following their respective resignations.

Halliday announced his resignation July 22, 1998 effective at the end of September, so I conducted a search in the ten day period following the announcement of his resignation on July 22, and then for the ten day period following September 29. I chose September 29, rather than September 30, since a number of stories appeared on the 29th, so to exclude it would appear to reduce the already low number of references to Halliday.

Ritter resigned August 26.

I searched in two categories: "Major Newspapers," and "transcripts"

The Results:

1) Number of references in period Nov 2-16, 1998

	Major Newspapers	Transcripts
Ritter	9	10
Halliday	1	0

Notes: The single reference to Halliday was in a Letter to the Editor published in the New York Times on Nov 11. In this period, Ritter was interviewed on CNN, ABC, NBC and CNBC.

2) Number of references in 10 days following resignation

	Major Newspapers	Transcripts
Ritter	93	24
Halliday 7/22-7/31	5	0
Halliday 9/29-10/8	2	1

Note: The single transcript for Halliday was from NPR's Morning Edition on October 7. Halliday also appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation on Nov 16, but the transcript appears not to have been uploaded yet.

Conclusions:

Obviously Ritter got much more attention than Halliday, and Ritter's charges have been taken far more seriously than Halliday's. There may be several reasons:

1) Ritter was more publicity-seeking

2) Ritter had been accused by the Iraqis of spying, so was clearly more "controversial," but a quick survey of transcripts shows that Ritter was given a very soft touch by US journalists, so the controversy did not work against him.

3) The media in the US does not consider the humanitarian situation in Iraq worth reporting. This is confirmed by the fact that most references to Halliday were in foreign newspapers.

4) There may have been other, competing major news stories at the time each resigned, but this would not explain the discrepancy when references to each were measured during the same two-week period.

Copyright Ali Abunimah 1998