Interview with Andrew Tyndall, Director of Tyndall Report

June 28th, 2004
Transcription by Volunteer Citizen Journalist Carol Dew

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, so why don't you introduce yourself and what you do.
ANDREW TYNDALL: My name's Andrew Tyndall. I publish The Tyndall Report, which analyzes television network news. I've been doing this for the past sixteen years. And I look at the network nightly news each night, and measure what stories they cover and how much time they spend on various topics and trends.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So why the television news? Why follow that?
TYNDALL: It's the most widely-watched -- most widely-consumed news delivery medium of all news in any medium.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, hold on a second. When you say, "it." I'm --
TYNDALL: Television -- Right I understand.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm going to be cutting out my voice. So --
TYNDALL: The reason I watch television news is because of all news media -- internet, radio, print, anything -- more people get their news on a day-to-day basis from television news than any other source.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, great. And what kind of trends did you see leading up to the -- my film is focusing on -- starting in August and November, up until March of '03 -- So of that time period, what sorts of trends did you see of the media? And how much coverage Iraq was getting?
TYNDALL: Okay. In the six months before the invasion happened, Iraq was, by far, the most heavily-covered story of all stories. So it wasn't that the network news didn't pay -- lack of any attention that they paid to that story. It was overwhelmingly the biggest foreign policy story, but it was also bigger than any domestic story as well. So what we have to look at is not whether they covered that story, but how they covered that story.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And how did they cover the story?
TYNDALL: As with almost all big foreign policy stories, the agenda -- the news agenda, is set by the administration in power at the time. And that means the dominant beats where you're going to cover a story like this will be first from the White House, and then from the other parts of the government -- the Pentagon and the State Department. What was -- The other beat that would've -- that did get a lot of attention during that time was the United Nations, because there was a lot of debates going on in the United Nations. What was interesting in particular about the way the build-up to the war was covered, was that it was covered first and foremost as a military story, and secondarily as a diplomatic story. Very different -- This war was very different from the build-up to the Gulf War in '92, when in much more emphasis was spent on the diplomacy. And the military angle was one angle among many, rather than the dominant angle.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So in other words, even the State Department was covering the stories as if, "When are we going to war?" Or?
TYNDALL: No. When you went to the State Department correspondent, you covered the diplomacy. When you went to the United Nations correspondent, you covered the inspections for weapons of mass destruction, and the debates in the Security Council. It's just that the amount of time that was spent assigning a story to those correspondents was proportionally much less than the amount of time assigning a story to a Pentagon correspondent.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay... So what kind of stories were the military covering? Or what was the beat that they were -- what kind of content?
TYNDALL: There's two ways to look at how the military correspondents -- the Pentagon correspondents covered the war. One is to say that they weren't treating the debate over going to war seriously -- in other words, they were treating the war as an inevitability. Second way to look at is they were accurately treating the war as an inevitability, in that they'd talked to people in the Pentagon, and they knew that knew the diplomacy was irrelevant, and that the war was going to happen whatever happened at the United Nations. So they were either incredibly honest with us, telling us, "There's no point in worrying about the diplomacy. The only thing that matters is the military." Or they were incredibly dismissive of us, in that they said, "What you think or say or do doesn't make any difference at all, because the decision's been made for you on your behalf."

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. And what -- For CBS, for example, did they even have a diplomatic correspondent? Or was it --?
TYNDALL: Yeah. The old system of having a full-time State Department correspondent and a full-time Pentagon correspondent has changed over the years, and now they have a thing called a (background noise)
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Hold on. Just checking the sound from outside. Just go ahead from the top.
TYNDALL: The old -- Fifteen or twenty years ago, all the networks had basically two full-time foreign affairs correspondents. One based at the State Department covering diplomacy, and one based at the Pentagon covering defence. A dozen or so years ago, the networks started to combine those two tasks under the label of a "National Security Correspondent." And any story either covering diplomacy or covering defence from inside the Beltway would be assigned to the same correspondent. NBC in the build-up to the war still had two. ABC started with two, and then their Pentagon man retired in the middle of the Iraq conflict, and they ended up with one. CBS had the one all along, based at the Pentagon, David Martin, but he would cover diplomacy as well. However, whenever it went to the United Nations, they would have another correspondent. So the debates in the Security Council about the war resolution, and the hearings with regard to the weapons of mass destruction and that sort of thing would not tend to be covered from the Pentagon.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And what about covering diplomacy from the White House angle?
TYNDALL: The way the networks organise it is that their White House correspondent covers all activities of the President. So it doesn't matter whether the President is engaged in diplomacy, or in his capacity as the Commander-in-Chief, or in domestic affairs. That's always the beat of the White House correspondent. They don't have a separate White House correspondent for foreign affairs and for domestic affairs.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, so let's say something that Bush was claiming -- that they didn't need a second resolution, and the rest of the world was saying that we needed a second resolution. Did you notice any sort of -- if it fell under the White House beat? Did they report what Bush said without having any sort of counter-weight?
TYNDALL: Now, the way in which the build-up to the war was handled inside the Beltway, in other words by the Washington DC bureaus of the various networks, would be in the pecking order of firstly, what the White House did in a given day; second, what the Pentagon did in a given day, thirdly, what the State Department did in a given day. There would be very little coverage -- There was very little coverage indeed, for instance, on any debate in Congress about whether there should be a war or not. Now, that's inside the Beltway; in other words, that's the activities of the US government itself. Now, there were occasions in the six months leading up to the war where the development wasn't inside the Beltway. There was actually, the US had to deal with some reaction from other governments -- either at the United Nations or abroad. So when you'd have a statement, for instance, when you'd have a statement from the President saying, "We don't need to go to the United Nations for a resolution to go to war," if there was a reaction from other governments, that would typically be covered by a correspondent in London, or at the United Nations, or in Paris, or wherever. So the reaction wouldn't typically be covered by the White House correspondent, but there would be two stories on that one issue -- one what Bush said, and one what the reaction would be.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, and to what extent did the stories from this time period -- did they depend or originate at these three beats?
TYNDALL: Almost all the stories originated inside the Beltway in the lead-up to the war. The story was generated from inside the Bush administration, and any reaction to that was always in response to what had happened from the Bush administration. It was never initiated from outside. Therefore, there was very little coverage of anti-war protests, either inside the United States or abroad. And there was little -- There was slightly more coverage, but still little coverage, about what the mood was in Baghdad itself. The places where the stories were generated outside the Bush administration were with regard to the search for the weapons of mass destruction and Han Blix's operation, which was covered in Iraq by correspondents who were based in Iraq.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And I think I saw in a Columbia Journalism Review article by Brent Cunningham that you had mentioned like of 414 stories, all but 34 originated in the -- ?
TYNDALL: I can't remember that statistic. But that was right, I did fact check it. I don't have it in my head. Of all the areas -- In retrospect, now that the war has been fought, of all the areas that were completely and utterly under-covered in the build-up to the war, the one that stands out now, in retrospect, is any planning for how a post-war occupation might go. That was covered even less than the coverage to the opposition to the war. So the idea that this story might have any consequences after the fighting -- after the invasion had happened, was completely missing from journalists, but also from the administration as well. It was just a missing beat from everyone concerned, not just from the administration.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So would you say that the coverage was dominated by events, as opposed to the larger issues and long-term thinking? Kind of day-to-day, or--?
TYNDALL: I mean, it sounds a silly thing to say, but it's sort of -- It's funny that it's true. The war was treated as a military matter only. Now obviously, it's a war, so it should be treated as a military matter only. But if war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the entire operation has to be seen as a political and diplomatic one. And the concentration on Pentagon planning, Pentagon decisions -- on human interest stories about members of the Armed Forces and whether they were going to live or die -- seeing the entire enterprise as a purely military one, meant that the policy itself was seen through a set of blinders, rather than in its full aspect.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And of the military stories, the enterprising stories that they were doing, it seemed like they were covering military exercises. Can you speak to the type of exercises they were --?
TYNDALL: The reason why it was very appealing to the networks to have the build-up of the troops in Kuwait as being a major facet of the unfolding story was -- it was one way in which they could personalize and humanize the story, by showing actual soldiers who were actually fighting. It was one way in which you could get outside the Beltway and actually go into the real world -- so you could see the desert. You could see what the countryside was going to be like. And also, the visuals of that story were very appealing for television, in that it's much more interesting to see tanks, and guns, and jets, and rifles, and bayonets than it is to see briefing rooms, and charts, and committee members.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So to what extent -- Or what kind of trends have you seen with this story that -- How important is the image? And if it doesn't have good images, then the story might not be covered?
TYNDALL: Let's talk about the importance of the image this way. Action is a very dynamic thing on television news. So it isn't so much that it is pretty, but that it's active. And there's nothing like the military to give great images of action and machinery and people engaged in dangerous activities -- all the sorts of things that appeal in visual imagery, not just in journalism, but also in fiction.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, great. And how do you see -- Do you track The New York Times to see what influence -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, the major daily newspapers have on television?
TYNDALL: I don't track The New York Times every day, but I've done individual studies looking at a given 6-month period, or a given 2-month period -- at various times to see -- to try and match the story selection on the nightly news with the front page stories that get onto The New York Times. And I look at it both -- what happened the morning before the nightly news came on, and also the morning after the nightly news came on. And what this tells -- Can reassure any viewer is -- that the national news agenda is a stable news agenda. In other words, the things that the networks find newsworthy -- newsworthy enough to put on their evening newscasts -- are the same things that the editors of The New York Times think are newsworthy enough to put on their front page. Now you can do studies to say, "Is one following the other? Who is influencing whom?" I don't think in the long run that matters. The fact that they're all reflecting the same set of news judgements is the important thing, not who is the leader and who is the follower.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And I guess from what I -- from my viewpoint is, the enterprising reporting, if something happens -- an investigative report that The New York Times does, and then maybe the news would pick up -- did you see that there was a lack of really hard-hitting enterprising investigative reporting on this issue leading up to the war in Iraq on the television news?
TYNDALL: The enterprise reporting that you saw on the television news came almost entirely from the Pentagon. And that was people revealing how close they were to getting the absolute plans for war. So that was the sort of reporting that was rewarded. In other words, how close to guaranteeing could a correspondent come -- when the war would start or how it would start. So there was a lot of secret or quasi -- semi-secret war plans -- war planning that got revealed and broken by the Pentagon correspondents. It was -- The function of that reporting was to register zero skepticism about whether a war would happen. Now there are those who say it had a further function, which was that it was cheerleading for the war. There are two debates you can have on this. One is if a reporter knows absolutely for sure that what he says will happen is going to happen, then he's not cheerleading. He's just telling you what the truth is, and you should know that. On the other hand, if the job of the propaganda machinery of the Pentagon is to make something that is in doubt seem inevitable, then the Pentagon correspondent is helping them in that effort by assuring us of its inevitability.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Is it also the role of reporters to raise scepticism and to challenge these? It seems like you need to have the role of media to step in, to challenge.
TYNDALL: If say, an anti-war protester is saying, "Let's go on a march, because if we show the government how unpopular this war is, we'll be able to change opinion inside the Beltway. and stop this war from happening." And a Pentagon correspondent, from his inside reporting, knows that those people who're deciding whether to go to war or not aren't going to pay any attention whatsoever to that march. Then he's probably being a sceptical and accurate reporter by saying, "It doesn't matter whether you march or not. The war's going to happen anyway."

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you talk a little bit about the branding of the war coverage as "Countdown Iraq," "Showdown with Saddam," "Road to War?"
TYNDALL: Yeah. Branding.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: When that started.
TYNDALL: Yeah. Okay. It's the technique of television news, generally speaking, when there's a huge story, to give a slogan, or a logo, or a linking theme around that story, so that you have the visual cue to know that you're returning time-and-time again to a given story. Now the fact that the networks chose to brand the war, or the countdown to the war, or the showdown with Iraq, or whatever the slogan that they used, is not an unusual thing and it's not specific to the war itself. It could happen with any major story. If you look at coverage of the Presidential election, they all have a brand or a logo for a big story like that -- "Looking Forward to Decision 2004," or whatever. So the fact of a logo is not unusual. In fact, it would have been highly unusual if they hadn't have had a logo. Now there was a big -- ABC, especially, was very careful not to be seen that it was rushing to war. And it made a very big deal of the fact that its countdown to battle was called "The Road to War?" with a question mark next to it, rather than a flat-out statement. So in other words, they were trying to imply that the war was not inevitable -- that if the war happened, then this is what might happen. That was subtlety that was initially lost on me, and I suspect, lost on anybody. But the drumbeat of the approach to war is something that's reinforced by this use of logos and slogans, and I don't really think it matters what the actual wording is of the title, rather than you're being told that it's very important by the fact that they're using all of their graphic design resources in order to build up to this major event.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And do you see that by calling it this, that they eliminated themselves from covering certain stories that would have shown -- that maybe the world doesn't want this war? Or there's a lot of opposition at the UN? Or--?
TYNDALL: There was no under-coverage of the fact that there was opposition to this war at the UN. There were many stories counting votes inside the Security Council, publicizing the French opposition to it. Many stories, even about the attempts to ridicule the French because they objected to it. So the key wasn't whether there was opposition at the UN, or in Europe, or even domestically. The key was to cover how effective that opposition would be in actually preventing the war. Now that's -- In retrospect, the opposition to the war was ineffective at preventing it. I'm not sure that if it had got more coverage than it did get, whether it would have had a better chance at preventing the war. I think, in retrospect, the war was pretty much of a done deal, and it was going to happen however massively the opposition to it had been covered by the news media.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So you feel that they would have found a way to go to war, no matter what happened?
TYNDALL: Well, that's the way the White House correspondents and the Pentagon correspondents covered it -- that it was a done deal. And that once they decided to deploy the troops in Kuwait, there was no pulling back. Now, obviously, if you're -- Okay, this is an interesting -- If you're the Pentagon, and you're trying to bluff Saddam Hussein into certain action by making him feel as though unless he acts in this certain way, then war is going to be inevitable, you would never do anything except to make war seem inevitable. Even if it actually wasn't inevitable. So, us being told that the war was inevitable could either have been truth -- Right? -- that it was inevitable. Or it could have been absolutely necessary perception for the Pentagon to put out in order for them to bluff Saddam Hussein into backing down and behaving the way that he wanted to. So either way, if you're a Pentagon correspondent, you're going to say, "War is inevitable." If it's the truth, or if it's a bluff.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, from the government's perspective, wouldn't that be illegal, according to the Smith-Mundt Act that prevents psyop operations from being conducted within the continental US?
TYNDALL: Yes, I -- Well, I don't know about the law. At the time when I watched it, I came to the conclusion the bluffing, even though it might work, was actually a bad way of pursuing foreign policy. Because you're not only bluffing your enemies, you're bluffing your own side as well. And I think if you're to try and go to war, you need as much support as possible. And the way to build support is by being honest with people, and not bluffing them. So I think, I would say, that just on policy grounds rather than on grounds of legality, it's probably better if you're honest with people, rather than if you're bluffing them. On the other hand, in retrospect, now we look at it, he was probably wasn't bluffing. He probably was sincere when he said we're going to go to war and nothing's going to stop us. And that was actually true, rather than a bluff.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So when you see the administration giving a sort of cover story at first, that this mobilization is to enforce the resolutions, and then eventually that line was blurred when the threshold was crossed, and now those troops are for war. And how was that -- How do you see that blurring of the line? And that coverage over that time period?
TYNDALL: The coverage of the blurring of the line -- or the blurring of the line itself. We -- Let's go back now. I mean, I think in this entire line of questioning, the important role to look at is the role of the Pentagon correspondents, as I've said before, because they were at the one hand the most prescient, and at the other hand, the most cynical. Because they would -- If you actually study the way they reported on the build-up to the war, they may have inserted a few phrases like "if it comes to that" or "if the worse comes to the worst," or something like that. But the general tone of their coverage was that "These troops were being deployed in order to go to war." And almost all of their coverage was how the war would happen, rather than how the bluff would happen. So as far as the Pentagon correspondents were concerned, the blurring of that line between deploying troops in order to threaten war, and deploying troops for war happened much earlier than the explicit statements of the President or of the Secretary of State, or even of the Secretary of Defence himself. So if you really wanted to know what was going to happen, not what should happen, but what was going to happen, the good people to listen to would've been the Pentagon correspondents, in retrospect.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. And how do you --
TYNDALL: I mean, okay. This is the crux of this entire debate, which is, "What are reporters there for?" Are reporters there to tell you what's going to happen? So you're informed. Or are reporters there to help you decide what should happen? So that you might be able to have some impact in changing peoples' minds. It seems, in this particular instance, in this story, it would've been really difficult for reporters to have fulfilled both roles. Because if they gave people the impression that their job was to decide what should happen, rather than what will happen, I think they would have given people who didn't want to go to war false hope -- that they actually had a chance at changing the policy.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Huh. So whose role is it? Is it the print reporters, news reporters, to ask those questions then?
TYNDALL: I think, I mean, first and foremost, in the United States of America, the job is the Congress's of the United States. They're the people who are supposed to monitor the role of the Commander in Chief, and restrain him when he's acting rashly. And if you're going to look at any institution in the entire country that failed to be skeptical about the rush for war, I mean, I would say that it was the Congress that headed that line.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, and then after that, that the media was just being honest in reporting what was going to happen? After October 11th?
TYNDALL: I'm talking specifically about the Pentagon correspondents more than anybody else. If the choice is to be honest and cynical or to give false hope, then I think they're probably better off being honest and cynical.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay.
TYNDALL: If that's the choice.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. Now, how did you -- Have you done comparisons on this issue with ABC vs. CBS vs. --?
TYNDALL: Yeah, I did some. And as I said --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay -- Sorry.
TYNDALL: There were marginal differences between the three networks in their tone leading up to the war. The biggest and most obvious one, was that question mark that ABC put on its "Road to War?" logo, making the entire enterprise seem more in doubt than the other two networks did. Once the war started, there were big differences. The major differences were in the status of each network's correspondents inside Baghdad itself. Because once the war started, there was huge difference in how the war looked from the Iraqi side. And CBS had its crew thrown out. So its overall -- the overall tone of its war coverage was lacking in coverage of what the Iraqi point of view was. Because their people weren't there physically inside Baghdad. ABC & NBC both had people there. NBC's got interrupted halfway through, because it had been taking its feed from Peter Arnett, who was fired when he was too vociferous in opposing the war for NBC's taste. So at the end, ABC had the most coverage from the Iraqi point of view. But that was during the war, rather than before the war.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And --
TYNDALL: The coverage of the build-up to the war, which relied so heavily on the Pentagon correspondents, continued once the fighting had started. Where most coverage from the field was from embedded reporters, and most consultants, analysts, and experts that were hired as -- in-house by the networks to give them advice what to do were former military brass. There were very few scholars, or human rights experts, or diplomatic experts, or Arabists or that sort of people who were hired as experts. Almost all the expertise in-house by all the networks was military expertise. So again, you have that funny thing that the war was mis-covered because it was covered as a military enterprise.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So that was including leading up to the war? You're saying -- Can you kind of characterise the different, What kind of experts would they go to during--?

TYNDALL: All of the networks hired consultants, which were on their own payroll, who weren't journalists, but had expertise in other areas. And they would routinely be used, not to file a story, but to be used for sound bites in a story where the correspondent would take a phrase and then edit it into the story. Or for an in-studio interview where an anchor would say, "Now, tell us about this. Tell us about this." Now the routine on all the networks, and the cable channels as well, was to overstaff their roster of consultants with former military officers. And have very few consultants who had expertise outside of the military area. And therefore, it was not only the diplomacy that got under-covered -- the nuances of the diplomacy that got under-covered -- but also the entire enterprise of post-war reconstruction, and how an occupation would be run. Where the military was relatively lacking in expertise, and you'd want people who had expertise working for the United Nations, or in Non-Governmental Organisations, or in human rights capacities.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And can you talk to the issue of international law as an issue that doesn't have a lot of visuals and images. So can you speak to -- Is that one of the reasons why it was -- maybe was it too complicated?
TYNDALL: International law -- Just trying to think what the -- You know, international law is not the sort of topic that would be covered, as such, on television network news -- just like international trade would be another example of something that would not be covered as such. That doesn't mean the beat doesn't get covered, but it's the consequences of the disputes around that area that get covered, rather than the abstract notions themselves. So international trade gets covered when you have protests in the street against the World Trade Organization, or you have people getting laid off because factories have gone to China, or something like that. International law gets covered when you have people being tortured, or when you have disputes, you know, inside the United Nations about whether a certain resolution is going to be passed or not. It's not the -- It's the consequences of those disputes that get covered, rather than the substance of them.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Because what -- Michael Getler, the ombudsman of The Washington Post wrote a column within the last couple of weeks, talking about leading up to the war, there were some stories that we buried within the paper, one of which was 'many legal scholars disagreed with the legal justification for war,' and was held off until March 18th. So it seemed like even legal scholars were disagreeing it, from all the way starting back in November, and all that this is -- that's the substance of France and what they were saying --
TYNDALL: Well -- Yes.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: It just seemed like that the substance of the nature of the debate was being covered.
TYNDALL: The nature of the debate about why the United States was planning to go to war and whether it was justified in making those decisions was unclear -- was obscure. Not just on the grounds of international law, but actually also on specific policy grounds. There were many different rationales that were given for war, and sometimes two or three of them simultaneously. And it was never clear at all why the war was being started. Not just whether it was legal or not, but actually why -- what the actual motives were. Again, the clarity with which the Pentagon was covered, not "Why are we going to war?", but "This is how -- the how of going to war, rather than the why" stood in stark contrast to both the diplomatic debate and also the political debate, where things were much less clear than with the Pentagon. I think one of the reasons why so much coverage came from the Pentagon was because there were things that the Pentagon correspondents were able to say with clarity -- "How the war would be fought" -- whereas diplomatic correspondents and political correspondents had a very hard time explaining why the war was being fought. Because -- I mean, the reason why they had a hard time explaining was because it was obscure.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: What is your sense of why the war happened...?
TYNDALL: To this day, I have no idea. I don't -- I don't know...
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: ...Oh right, just say, "I don't know" as a full sentence -- Sorry without the question.
TYNDALL: To this day, I don't know why the United States went to war with Iraq.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And you gain no insight from the news media as to why. Or I mean, did they -- Is that something that they should be covered?
TYNDALL: No, the insight I got from the news media was that the motives were unclear. I don't think there was a clear reason that the news media had failed to reveal. I think the news media have revealed how unclear the reasons were. Accurately revealed how unclear the reasons were.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And there also seemed to be a shift after the war --
TYNDALL: There was a shift in the build-up to the war.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right so --
TYNDALL: There was a shift between, "Are we going to have to go back to the Security Council for a second vote?" "We don't need to." So, was the war -- Did the war have to be authorised by a second vote or not? That happened in the build-up to the war. And people just changed their minds, and they didn't explain to you why they changed their minds. They just said they did. I don't think the news media was lacking in clarity, because the picture that we received from them was a confused one. I think they were clearly reporting the confusion.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: But from my perspective, I saw that there was a debate over the international law, that our closest allies, Britain and Australia, everyone wanted the second resolution. They were saying that under law that they needed it. But the reporters were just reporting what the Bush administration was saying. And then when there was that switch, that exactly -- that thing happened where they just -- they just said, "Okay, they just changed their minds." And there was no explanation --
TYNDALL: Well, but they did, but -- What are you telling me, that there was an explanation that was uncovered?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, yeah that all along --
TYNDALL: So you're saying there was a real -- there was a real --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: There was a reason why that none of the television -- that not even The New York Times or Editor & Publisher that there were reasons why that those shifts were made -- That they're answers that were available as early as October and November, that people were out there saying, "You have to do this under international law," which explains all the behavior.
TYNDALL: Okay. Explains the behavior --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: If you say, "You need to get this second resolution." Then -- That's what Britain was saying in the debates, and --
TYNDALL: Well no, hold on. Well, Britain said, "We need a second resolution." Then we said -- then Britain said, "We're not going to abide by an unreasonable veto." And then they said, "If we have a majority, it doesn't matter whether the minorities veto it or not." And then it said, "We don't need a majority." And then it said, "We don't need a vote." Britain said those -- that's my reconstruction. Those shifts in statement by the British government were accurately reported by the major news media here.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Except for -- What's the right answer? There's a correct answer, and that's because it's law, right?
TYNDALL: Well, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a media analyst. So I mean, I don't know -- "except there's a right answer..." Well let's put it this way, they can't have been right at all stages of those five points. There's got to be somewhere they were less right than they were at other ones. They changed their minds more quickly than the law did. Shall we say that? Now, I don't -- My -- Looking back on the coverage -- Looking back on the way it was covered from the point of view of international law, which is the line of questioning that you're following here. It was certainly never covered in a way that would make us American viewers believe that the overriding important criterion about the decision to go to war was whether it was legal or not under International Law. We were never -- It was never -- That was never presented to us as the binding decision about whether war would happen -- would be its legality or not. And again, I would -- I think that that would be another example of cynically accurate reporting. That was actually a true representation of the way the Bush administration felt -- that the legality of the war was neither here nor there. Or was not going to be a deterrent from them conducting the war. The fact that it was illegal wasn't going to stop them. If it was illegal. The point is, looking too closely into the question "Is it legal?" or "Is it not legal?" was not a binding -- wasn't binding on their decision.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: It seems like a lot of the diplomatic coverage that was being covered was being framed from "Do we have enough votes for war yet?" as opposed to "What is the nature of the debate?" If you listened to the nature of the debates, the nature of the debates were talking about "Is the war legal? Do we need this second resolution?"
TYNDALL: Well, there were other debates as well, which is "Were there weapons of mass destruction there?" There was a whole lot of that debate being covered, about when Blix made one report and made another report, and that was a lot of the coverage form the United Nations was on that issue, rather than on the war itself.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And --
TYNDALL: But that was similarly inconclusive.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right.
TYNDALL: Nowadays people say, "Looking back on it, everyone agreed that there were weapons of mass destruction there." But if you actually looked at the Blix reports, he never said that. He said that it hadn't been proved that there weren't any. Or it hadn't been -- The paperwork to prove the destruction of them was incomplete. And in fact, there was an interview by Dan Rather of Colin Powell, where that was his bottom-line case for the war was -- the reason for the war was because Iraq's paperwork was out of order.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: That's what I see as well, that there's these things that come out -- that they said, "Well, everyone agreed." But there was Scott Ritter, he didn't agree. There was Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder doing reporting. There was Julian Borger. There was David Albright -- all these people who were raising questions about the substance of the actual aluminium tubes, all the evidence. Lots of people questioning. But it seemed like there wasn't a lot of skeptic voices --
TYNDALL: Which goes back to the -- I mean, we're going around in circles here -- But that goes back to the point, which is -- It didn't look then, and it certainly doesn't look now, as though the reason to go to war was anything to do with weapons of mass destruction. It seemed as though the war had been decided on not for that reason.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So do you see that the Bush administration was treating the United Nations as a pretext to go to war, and to have this international legitimacy?
TYNDALL: Do I see that? Or do I think that's how it was portrayed by the news media?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: How it was portrayed by the news media.
TYNDALL: Okay. My reconstruction of it is that -- The build-up of troops in Kuwait getting ready to go to war could not have happened without being conducted underneath the United Nations resolution. If the troops had -- And that would be the way it was portrayed -- that the troops were initially deployed to be in Kuwait pursuant to a United Nations resolution. Then what happened in the coverage was, the actual dynamics of the troop deployment -- both from the coverage from inside the Pentagon, but also coverage of the troops there in Kuwait -- the human interest coverage, the action footage, just the sheer logistics of that number of people massing ready for battle -- that became the driving force of the coverage. And the niceties of the debate inside the United Nations was there as a warning sign, "If things go badly you're not going to have much support back home." But not as a veto. And if you look at it politically now, that's probably an accurate way in which the entire enterprise has unfolded, which is the fact that the war was entered into in the spirit of bluff rather than the spirit of support. It was entered into on shaky legal grounds rather than firm legal grounds. That it was done as a unilateral or narrowly multi-national, rather than a global battle. All of those things are things that have come back. Those are things that were accurately reported at the time -- the fact that the war was being entered into as a huge risk by the administration, and that reporting has been vindicated now.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: One thing that I -- I don't think anywhere in 1441 or any explicit resolution did they mandate that the United States send troops over there. Is that what you're saying, that it was sent in support directly or implicitly by the United States --?
TYNDALL: Yes. Again, I'm not talking in legal terms at all here. I'm just talking in terms of -- When you're the government, and you're conducting actions that are in full view of the news media and the Congress, and the public, there are certain things that have to happen for you to protect yourself against charges that these actions are reckless or outrageous. And that's how I'm interpreting the narrative of the UN resolution. I'm not saying -- I don't think it mattered to either the American public or to the news media or to Congress, the actual fine print of that resolution. What mattered was: when these troops are being sent all over that way, and seemingly getting ready for battle -- Is that from something that's just come out of the clear blue sky? Or just fully formed out of somebody's brain? Or was it pursuant to some actual case that's been made in front of a world body? And that was the way in which that troop deployment was perceived at the time. And I think it was reported as that at the time. I think no White House correspondent or Pentagon correspondent who reported on the troop deployment to Kuwait did so out of the context of the search for weapons of mass destruction, which had been authorised by the UN resolution -- a unanimous UN resolution. And that was the way in which that was portrayed at the time when it happened.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: (time remaining) Yeah, just a couple more minutes -- Let's see -- How do you -- Have you rated or qualified -- How do you evaluate -- Do you evaluate how well they performed leading up to the war?
TYNDALL: No, just descriptively. The evaluation I do is in terms of what resources they deployed. How much time they spent on various angles of the story. What was their lead, and what wasn't their lead. Now the quality of their reporting is something that I -- that's not my task. However, what I can say is that -- When you actually examine what angles they chose to take and where they chose to deploy their resources, you can see the sins of omission much more clearly than you can see the sins of commission. In other words, it wasn't what they did, it was what they failed to do that's the most obvious thing. And even though anti-war protesters claimed, justifiably, that their protests were under-covered, I think the under-coverage of the protests against the war is insignificant compared with the under-coverage of the planning for the occupation, which was -- I mean, because that was something that the Washington D.C. bureaus of the networks could anticipate was going to happen. The lack of a war happening was a lot more questionable than whether there would be an occupation happening. And that would have been -- so they knew that was going to happen. And so that would have -- that wasn't a theoretical debate. That was a practical debate. And that was a thing that wasn't covered.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: At the end of the story segments, it seemed that a lot of correspondents will want to throw in a lot of anonymous sources or "we heard this" insights. Could you talk about that last stand-up?
TYNDALL: I mean, that's routine -- especially at Pentagon. Or at the White House and the Pentagon --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry. What is routine?
TYNDALL: Both at the Pentagon and the White House -- there's an awful lot of reporting that goes on where the planning, or the expectations, or the spin of the institution is told to the reporter, and they haven't got a sound bite to justify that, so they've got to say it themselves. Unlike newspapers, where the tone of a statement is very similar whether it's attributed or whether it's given a blind source. You're reading one paragraph after another, and it all looks -- has the same tone of voice. There's a radically different tone of voice in television news between a sound bite for attribution, where you actually have Rumsfeld saying something, or Colin Powell saying something, or George Bush saying something -- and a rumor, or a hint, or a blind source, or an expectation, or a spin that's given by a correspondent. So the use of blind sources on television is a lot less pernicious than it is on newspapers. Because those little tidbits that you get on television have much less punch than a sound bite does. So they come out of the reporter's mouth, not out of an official's mouth, and are therefore worth less, because they come out of the reporter's mouth.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So they're worth less. But it seemed like there was also a tone change, that they would say things in the unnamed sources that they wouldn't be saying in the headline.
TYNDALL: But therefore you give the headline -- You give the headline, and the named source, and the actual sound bite much more credibility, because it has a name to it. It has a tone of voice to it. You had the context in which it's set. Something that the reporter slips in at the end that he was told by some source is something that not only should you give less credibility to, because the person is not standing behind what they're saying, but also in the vocabulary of television news it actually is less powerful. Because it's said as a third-person statement rather than a direct statement, and you can't see the expression on the person's face when they're saying it, or the context in which they're saying it. And that's what gives power to television news, when you actually see a talking head telling you something.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And -- What did you notice on Colin Powell's speech on February 5th, kind of that time period, the reaction and the coverage?
TYNDALL: Colin Powell when he was at the security -- Okay. Colin Powell, at the Security Council, giving the best intelligence estimate that he possibly could about the proof that weapons of mass destruction did, in fact, exist inside Iraq. That was one of those occasions where television news goes differently from reporting on the nightly news, in that it was much more like a C-SPAN moment. And there are those very important occasions, where television ceases to become a journalistic medium, and becomes a display medium, as it were, where it's unmediated, in that the reporter doesn't do any mediation. We just hear the person speak, and judge it for itself. So that's completely different tone of voice from journalism on television -- the actual statement -- hearing the actual presentation itself. When you actually study how the speech was covered, rather than how the speech was covered later by reporters, other than how it was presented -- unedited, unmediated by television -- then almost all of the claims that he made, that Powell made in the Security Council, were questioned in the reporting on the speech. The questioning of them by French people, or by Arab people, or by Iraqi people, etcetera, etcetera, had less weight than the unmediated speech itself by Powell. But I wouldn't that call that journalism. I'd call that something else -- displaying the speech itself. The other important thing that happened around the same time as Powell made his speech, of course, was Dan Rather went to Baghdad and interviewed Saddam Hussein himself. And Saddam Hussein said that he didn't have any weapons.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Did it seem like, though the whole time, they were saying they weren't -- didn't have any weapons?
TYNDALL: Right. And this -- they actually got the sound bite from him.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Right. And so. Okay, and I think that's it. Do you have any last thoughts?
TYNDALL: No. That's Okay. I've told you what I think.