Bozell noted that, during a Jan. 17 "Nightline/Viewpoint" special broadcast, ABC News President David Westin promised viewers that the network's coverage would be "objective and give just the facts to the American people."

"It should not have been difficult for Peter Jennings to have covered the run-up to war in a manner that approached ABC News President David Westin's standard of 'objective,'" Bozell opined. "Both NBC and CBS' News' coverage, while not perfect, came far closer to meeting this standard."

'Dissenting View[s] Are Very Inconvenient'

Cliff May of Foundation for the Defense of Democracies spent more than 20 years as a working journalist. He believes he knows why biased coverage is happening.

"The elite media, very often, will establish a 'prevailing narrative' - or are persuaded of a 'prevailing narrative' - early on, and then they defend it with an almost religious zeal," May said. "In this case, the 'prevailing narrative' has been that President Bush wants to go to war against Iraq and that such a war will be resented and resisted by Iraqis, by Arabs, by Muslims.

"So Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims with a dissenting view are very inconvenient. They get in the way of the story [the elite media] want to tell."

Zainab al-Suwaij, executive director of American Islamic Conference, grew up in Iraq. She charges the establishment media in the U.S. with grossly underreporting support inside Iraq for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

"Ninety-five percent of the Iraqi population share the same view, but the only problem is they are afraid of the government, and they cannot talk in public about that," al-Suwaij said. "People inside America, they think that Iraq is just like America; a free press, everybody can talk about their opinions, and so on and so forth. But unfortunately, this is not the case."

Al-Suwaij related the story of a third-grade classmate who, during the Iran-Iraq war, questioned in class whether the Iranian leadership was as bad as the Iraqi government had led its people to believe.

"She disappeared the next day with her whole family," al-Suwaij recalled. "At 9 years of age, we were always asked in the classroom, 'Did your family say anything about the government last night?'"

Networks Don't Seek Exiles for Iraqi Viewpoint

Eleana Gordon also works with Foundation for the Defense of Democracies on a project called "Women for a Free Iraq." The project is designed to provide reporters with access to Iraqi citizens outside of the control of the Hussein dictatorship.

"Who do you see representing, supposedly, the Iraqi point of view? There are people from [Council on American-Islamic Relations], which is a Saudi-backed Muslim organization. They're not Iraqi people," Gordon charged.

"We don't see a lot of Iraqis, and yet there are 4 to 5 million Iraqis in exile, about 20 percent of the Iraqi population," she added.

Bozell suggested four changes that ABC News, "World News Tonight" and Jennings could make to reduce the bias he sees in their coverage: