Richard Pérez-Peña – IHT.com March 24, 2008
Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet.
Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The drop in coverage parallels – and may be explained by – a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq "very closely" in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall.
Experts offer many other explanations for the declining media focus, like the danger and expense in covering Iraq, and shrinking newsroom budgets. In the last year, a flagging economy and the most competitive presidential campaign in memory have diverted attention and resources.
"Vietnam held the media's attention a lot better because it was a war with a draft that touched a lot more people; people were sent against their will, and many more Americans were killed," said Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.
"In a conventional war, like World War II, there's dramatic change, a moving front line, a compelling narrative," he said. But after the triumphal first months, Iraq became a war of insurgents vs. counterinsurgents, harder to make sense of, "with more of the same grim news, day after day."
The three broadcast networks' nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.
Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year.
The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year's Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.
The drop accelerated with a sharp decline in violence in Iraq that began at the end of last summer. The last six months have been safer for American troops than any comparable period since the war began, with about 33 killed each month, compared with about 91 a month over the previous year.
"The available news hole got so much smaller because election and economic news took up so much of the space," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center.
There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers' archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend.
"I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war" in the first years, said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. "Now it's less than one a day."
He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown "surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail."
Many news organizations have fewer people in Iraq than they once did, though no definitive numbers are available. Coalition officials have said that although there were several hundred reporters embedded with military units early in the war, the number has been measured in tens in recent months.
Violence against journalists makes reporting on Iraq costly and difficult; executives of The New York Times have said that the newspaper is spending more than $3 million a year to cover Iraq. The risks have forced news organizations to hire private security forces and Iraqi employees who can go places that Westerners cannot safely explore.
From the start of the war through 2005, journalists and their support workers were killed in Iraq at a rate of one every 12 days, according to tallies kept by the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2006 and 2007, the rate was one every eight days. Most of those killed have been Iraqis.
"Danger and the expense are gigantic factors," Jones said. "The news media have to constantly revisit how much money and risk to expend.”
www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/business/24press.php
Last updated 26/03/2008
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