Since Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation on Tuesday ordering doctors to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, the U.S. news media have repeatedly claimed that the wide-eyed and responsive Mrs. Schiavo is in a coma.
Typical was the lead sentence in a wirew report this morning, which stated erroneously, "The fight over the life of a comatose woman took a dramatic twist when a hospital began rehydrating her on orders from Gov. Jeb Bush."
The wire story coverage prompted the New York Daily News to headline its story on yesterday's developments in the Schiavo case: "Jeb Bush Orders Coma Victim to Be Fed Again."
Though the New York Times omitted the word "coma" from its front page story on Schiavo, the headline on the Times' jump page read "Gov. Orders Comatose Woman Fed."
Particularly bizarre was the coverage in New York's Newsday, which front-paged a photo of an alert and smiling Schiavo gazing up at her mother over a headline that referred to her as a "brain damaged, comatose woman."
From mid-Tuesday, when Gov. Bush's decision was announced, through this morning, 72 mainstream news reports mischaracterized Mrs. Schiavo as "comatose," a Lexis-Nexis search showed.
Webster's New World Dictionary defines the word coma as "a state of deep, prolonged unconsciousness, as from injury." Videos released by Mrs. Schiavo's parents show her fully conscious and responding to visual stimulation.
Press reports also mischaracterized the decision to grant Gov. Bush the authority to intervene in the case as gut-wrenching for Florida legislators, when in fact the measure passed in the state's legislature by a landslide margin of more than 2 to 1.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Media Bias
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