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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Until the recent flare-up in Najaf, Iraq had faded from the front pages -- despite continued carnage and chaos. Team Bush couldn't be happier.
Aug 12, 2004 | Despite arriving sooner than expected and catching much of the American press off guard, the June 28 hand-over of sovereignty in Iraq was trumpeted as a momentous event. That night CNN devoted its entire prime-time lineup to analyzing the brief, 15-minute ceremony in Baghdad. Fox News cheered it as "a day that will go down in history." Newspapers the next morning were clogged with reports from Iraq and speculation about what the transfer of political power would mean for the rebuilding of Iraq, as well as for the 140,000 U.S. troops serving there.
The hand-over, though, has done very little to change things for the better in Iraq. In the past six weeks, the country has been gripped in escalating violence, forcing some coalition countries and private contractors to flee for safety. Kidnappings by insurgents have multiplied, as have assassinations, while electricity still remains in short supply. Iraq's national conference -- critical to the eventual implementation of free elections -- has been postponed, and U.S. soldiers continue to die.
"On June 28, my feeling was nothing was going to change because of the hand-over," says Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "There were still going to be car bombings and U.S. soldiers being killed, and that's exactly what's happened. Nothing has changed."
But one thing did change: U.S. press coverage of Iraq. The hand-over marked a turning point in the level and intensity of media interest, which sharply decreased, particularly on the 24-hour cable news channels. "Clearly the volume in press coverage has gone way down," says Cook. "'Sleepy' is a good word to describe it. The coverage doesn't compare with anything we'd seen during the previous 12 months from Iraq. The drop-off has been noticeable."
"From the very beginning this has been an administration that wanted to hide the toll of the war -- and the media have been absolutely complicit in that," says Nancy Lessin, co-founder of the antiwar group Military Families Speak Out. Lessin's stepson, a Marine, served in Iraq during the spring of 2003. "In April of this year, violence in Iraq was up and it was hard to keep the war off the front pages. But as soon as possible the pictures changed. Since June 28, [the war has] been off the front pages again."
More recently, a week's worth of fierce fighting in Najaf between coalition forces and militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army has begun to bring Iraq back into focus. And if U.S. forces unleash a frontal assault there, Iraq will once again dominate the headlines, as it so often has in the past 18 months. "We're still interested in the story. We're on the air every night about Iraq," says Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president of news at CBS. "But what's happened is, interest in the political scene has increased. News always ebbs and flows, and at times it may appear Iraq is taking a back seat to politics because that's what's in the news right now."
Following the ebb-and-flow theory, Iraq is likely to return to the media forefront, however temporarily, when the one thousandth U.S. soldier dies in Iraq. Based on the current fatality rate, that somber event could happen as soon as late September.
Still, considered as a whole from July 1 to the present, coverage of Iraq seems to have diminished. "It's incredible how the press has veered away from Iraq" since June 28, says Peter Singer, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. Last week "six U.S. soldiers were killed in 24 hours, and there was nothing. If you're President Bush and you see headlines about Martha Stewart and Laci Peterson, you've got to count yourself lucky, because that means the focus is no longer on Iraq."
The physical danger reporters face inside Iraq has clearly curbed their efforts to report more. And for editors and producers back in America, trying to find a way to make the repetitive nature of the events in Iraq compelling remains a challenge. "One can imagine editors saying, 'Gee, we just did a roadside bombing story yesterday,'" says Singer. "But that's how an insurgency works; it's the same attack over and over."
That fatigue among members of the press corps makes it less likely that the daily violence in Iraq will be considered newsworthy. "I covered the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003, and that was a shock," says Ken Dilanian, a staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has spent several months reporting from Iraq in the past year. "As I recall, CNN broke into its regular programming live and stayed with it all day. That was with 24 people dead. Nowadays that happens every week, and it's on Page A14."
Press fatigue "was bound to set in," agrees Cook. "But it is uncanny how it occurred right after the change in sovereignty on June 28."
The media's shift away from Iraq is good news for the White House, which has watched American sentiment turn decisively against the war and specifically against President Bush's handling of the ongoing military effort. "Without question, the Bush administration is better off with no news from Iraq," says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served in Baghdad as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority last spring.
