2005 Annual Report - Network TV Newsroom Investment

A great deal of the money being spent on covering the Iraq war is to protect the journalists who have been sent there to cover it. In a May 2004 article in Broadcasting & Cable magazine, one network executive was reported to have said that his company "is paying $2 million a year for life insurance for employees who are, quite literally, in harm's way. That expense and security - highly trained, ex-Special Forces military types that all the networks have hired from shadowy British firms like Centurion, Pilgrims and AKE - are the largest line items for the networks."⁵ The article suggested that, conservatively, a network like CNN might be spending some $360,000 a month on the just over two dozen bodyguards traveling with its four dozen staff members.

Armored vehicles, like the car that may well have saved the lives of a CBS production crew targeted by a bomber in February 2004 on the road near Baghdad, run approximately $150,000 to $200,000.⁶

Network insiders also told Broadcasting and Cable that ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN, combined, had spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 million, or an average of $7 million apiece over the first year of the Iraq conflict. That figure was most likely higher for NBC, with additional responsibilities to CNBC, MSNBC and Telemundo; it may have spent $8 to $9 million.⁷

In a speech delivered as part of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies' Media Conference: The American Media and Wartime Challenges prior to the start of the Iraq War (March 22, 2003), Lawrence K. Grossman, former head of PBS and NBC News, said NBC had spent $250,000 a day "in pre-war coverage, positioning…people and equipment." At that time, Grossman stated that Network news divisions were anticipating spending as much as $1million a day on coverage-roughly what was spent at the start of the 1991 Gulf War.

The conflict has continued longer than anyone anticipated, and networks have continued their coverage, although not with the intensity seen during the so-called initial combat phase; there are fewer embedded correspondents, reporters in Baghdad are now confined largely to the Green Zone, and there is more pool coverage. The networks' planning may have fallen into the trap of "fighting the last war": much of their budgeting and planning may have been based on the expectation that this war would be as brief as the one in 1991. There is little doubt that the original budgets are being stretched.

Will the networks scale back their coverage? As Grossman said in his speech, those news operations are now financially cushioned by much larger corporate entities.⁸ That will greatly strengthen their ability to continue covering the war even as it continues to be an unexpected and unwelcome line item.

According to the May 2004 Broadcasting & Cable article, a news organization insider said those in charge know covering a war is "expensive [but] they know we've been fiscally disciplined, and they've been exceedingly generous in making sure we have the money we need to cover war."⁹

On the other hand, other insiders say that historically, parent companies, big or small, have always been generous when it came to covering extraordinary events, such as wars or disasters. The real issue is whether the owner then offsets those costs by insisting on cutbacks elsewhere in the news division later.

There is less doubt that news organizations have also benefited, at least financially, from the fact that improvements in technology have made covering the war easier and more cost-efficient than before. The two-man crew that was the rule in years past, for instance, has been reduced to one as the weight and bulk of TV news field cameras have shrunk.