PETER JENNINGS on ABC's World News Tonight calls missile defense a system "that has never been proven to work and may never work." The Los Angeles Times suggests missile defense will put the country at "greater risk of attack." ABC's Ted Koppel says support for missile defense is a "very hard-line position." NBC's Jim Miklaszewski questions whether such a system is "worth it" in light of its possible "threat to U.S.-Russia relations." Newsweek gives missile defense a down arrow after a snafu in a July 7 test, saying it's "time to deep-six this megabillion-dollar fiasco." And the New York Times? It's as passionately opposed now to missile defense, not only in its opinion pieces but also in its news stories, as it has been ever since President Reagan first announced his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983.
Missile defense joins abortion, gay rights, and Elian Gonzalez as an issue that is covered with palpable bias by the mainstream media. With missile defense, it's liberal bias with a twist. Normally the press doesn't buy into a political group's labeling of itself or its foes. "Pro-lifers" become "anti-abortion activists," while abortion advocates are "supporters of abortion rights." With missile defense, the media have adopted the term used by critics: Star Wars.
The most striking feature of the coverage of the missile defense issue is its hostility. Positive stories about the need for defending the country against missile attack are virtually non-existent. Story after story dwells on arguments used by critics. A missile defense will violate the ABM treaty. It won't work because it can't tell decoys from real missiles. It will undermine American relations with other countries. It will spark a new arms race.
Journalists love to link missile defense to failed military defenses of the past. William J. Broad of the New York Times started an article with this: "For ages, nations have dreamed of building invulnerable shields to protect themselves from hostile forces. There was the Great Wall and the Maginot line and, in America, the safeguard antimissile system and 'Star Wars.'" James Kitfield of National Journal wrote: "The yearning for a defensive shield to protect man from his enemies stretches back through recorded history to Greek mythology and the aegis cloak worn by Zeus as a symbol of power and imperviousness." All attempts, however, were "eventually foiled by agility or subterfuge, or overwhelmed by the advances in offensive power."
Not surprisingly, the media seized on the failure of the interceptor test as new grounds for doubting whether any missile defense system could ever work. Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times said the United States "has no choice . . . for years to come" but to rely on the threat of retaliation by offensive missiles to deter attacks. David Martin of CBS, the best of the Pentagon reporters on TV, played up the importance of the old Trident II missile that failed in the test. "If a supposedly reliable component can fail, how can you count on all the cutting-edge technology that is going to be a part of missile defense?" Martin asked on CBS Sunday Morning.
A month earlier, the Washington Post made a generally positive report on missile defense by a group of experts headed by retired Air Force general Larry Welch sound negative. Here's how the piece, by Roberto Suro and Thomas E. Ricks began: "A classified report by a Pentagon-appointed panel of experts raises numerous warning flags about the current plan for a missile defense shield. . . . " Many paragraphs later was buried the good news: "Overall, the new report gives the Pentagon's missile defense developer a 'B plus grade for work done thus far,' and it grants an overall blessing to the plans drawn up for future testing and evaluation, a senior official said."
The Post twinned its coverage of the Welch report with another negative story, this one claiming a missile shield would undermine arms control: "The United States' campaign to develop a national missile defense system has intensified doubts abroad about its commitment to arms control, which in turn is undermining a key U.S. foreign policy goal: strengthening safeguards against the spread of nuclear weapons," wrote William Drozdiak. This touches on a principal source of the media's bias against missile defenses. Reporters have a remarkable reverence for the philosophy of arms control. Thus, their reports never question conventional arms control thinking or ask whether missile defenses would be a better way to prevent nuclear war.
In particular, reporters writing about national security appear desperate to retain, unaltered, the ABM treaty. John J. Goldman of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "many nations, including Russia and China, object to the U.S. proposal to build a national missile defense system, which would require amendments to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed by the Soviet Union and the United States in 1972." What's rarely examined is whether the treaty still serves a true arms control purpose. Usually ignored is the fact that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the treaty's author, now opposes the ABM treaty and has called it a "relic."
Finally, there's Time magazine, which holds a special place in the coverage of missile defense. Deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott was covering the White House for Time when Reagan unveiled SDI. Talbott was appalled, since the idea of a missile defense conflicted with his notion of arms control. For 17 years, Time has kept up a drumbeat of criticism. "The heart of Ronald Reagan's 1983 Star Wars program lives on, kept beating by a mix of election-year politicking, behind-the-scenes defense-industry puppeteering, and a fiercely committed group of conservative think tanks and antimissile-system advocates," Christopher John Farley of Time wrote. Times change, circumstances change, the science of missile defense changes. Media bias, at Time and elsewhere, never does.
Sean Vinck is an intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.