Who's Osama? To Fox, Schiavo's A Bigger Name

April 1 2005
Counterbias.com
Robert Furs


Who or what is the bigger issue—Terri Schiavo or Osama bin Laden?

The answer may be subjective. They’re both undeniably large issues in the American conscience. But while one focuses on a single individual with their family locked in a bitter dispute prolonged by a grandstanding government, the other issue – Osama, a name you don’t hear anymore from the U.S. government (and haven’t heard since fraudulent connections with Saddam Hussein were posited by that same government) – spans the day-to-day threat of al-Qaeda along with the memory and horrors of September 11, 2001.

Only one network has given more mention to Terri Schiavo than Osama bin Laden in the last year according to an informal study (my informal study, that is), and that network, maybe unsurprisingly to most, is Fox News.

According to a Factiva search of the transcripts of the available listed news shows from all six respective major networks in the United States – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News – only the latter has mentioned Terri Schiavo more than Osama bin Laden in its major news-related broadcasts in the last year (pre-April 1, 2005).

Terri Schiavo and the passions and conflicts her story has inflamed may be a relatively large issue to all political perspectives. On one side, the Religious Right worries about its implications for the Pro-Life cause, while others (on both the Left and Right) may see the issue through the prism of the evils of big government and Congress sticking their nose in private matters.

It begs the question: what does it mean that Fox News seems to be more concerned with Terri Schiavo than Osama bin Laden? Is it a case of a conservative news network highlighting a right-wing issue and magnifying its importance and the coverage of that issue? Or does it just shed light on how little Osama bin Laden’s name has been mentioned on Fox News – a sort of mirror of the Bush’s administration’s current hush-hush policy on the former ‘enemy number one’ who has seemed to fall off the face off the earth’s axis of evil?

It speaks to both explanations. Fox News, Republican-American favorite and laughing stock of the sane world, appears less intent on mentioning Osama bin Laden’s name, for fear of reminding its viewers that the Great George W. Bush hasn’t fulfilled his promise of capturing or killing the culprit of the worst terrorist attack in American history – and the network appears especially anxious to promote the Schiavo matter, currently the top-ranked outrage on the Republican and Christian Right's slate.

Quantitatively, the proof of Fox News' odd outlying bias on this particular matter is there. My informal search of the Factiva online news database for transcripts from the last year showed that, in the 12 Fox News programs logged by the database, a search for Terri Schiavo turned up 306 results while one for Osama bin Laden turned up 239 segments in which he was mentioned. This is a ratio of 0.78 Osama mentions to every Schiavo mention on Fox. All the networks, in increasing order of preference for reporting on the world’s most wanted terrorist, are as follows…

Osama-to-Schiavo ratio for year prior to April 1, 2005:
Fox News: 0.78
ABC News: 1.59
NBC: 2.32
CBS News: 2.54
CNN: 3.48
MSNBC: 4.07

As a comparison or control group, here are some print publication Osama-to-Schiavo results from the last year:
New York Times: 4.19
New York Post: 5.86
Washington Post: 6.27
Washington Times: 7.67
Wall Street Journal: 8.54

(These numbers are about as scientific I can achieve with the database that I have access to. If anyone can give more thorough results that show otherwise, I would welcome them.)

As the Schiavo story has just become a big thing in a span of a few weeks, its incredible that as far as the television news networks go, coverage of Schiavo has bombed Osama bin Laden into oblivion in just a few weeks as the personal drama unfolded into a media fiasco.

Ask someone at Fox what the grander story is when it comes to the lives of Americans: the life of one poor woman, her husband and the family hoping to keep their daughter alive – or the man President Bush promised to apprehend, dead or alive? Someone ought to ask Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch or Bill O’Reilly if the Schiavo controversy really is more important to the American people than the threat posed by the man who just a few years ago was the face of all evil – even if mere mention of his name dawns negatively upon News Corporation’s beloved administration.

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