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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Now the administration is much more interested in ushering the war on terror back into the foreground, while shuffling Iraq into the background. "Terrorism news trumps Iraq news for Bush," says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. The emphasis on terrorism news fits with Bush's poll results. Fifty-two percent of Americans approve of how Bush is handling the war on terror, compared with just 37 approving of his actions in Iraq, according to the latest CBS poll.
So far, the White House's choreography is working as planned, particularly on cable TV, which is feasting on fresh terror warnings at home while giving just token attention to Iraq. So are newspapers like the New York Post. On Aug. 7, under the banner headline "War on Terror," the Post spread 11 stories over five pages detailing the "Crackdown on Qaeda Creeps." The Post ran just a single article that day about the situation in Iraq. Readers might be getting the impression that Iraq is as irrelevant as Afghanistan has become.
Yet the diminished attention to Iraq has created an odd media disconnect. While most pundits agree Iraq will be a key issue in November, Americans are being exposed to less reporting and analysis about the war. "There's an inverse relationship in press coverage and the situation in Iraq," says Cook. "It's amazing; the press has grown weary of reporting the same story regardless of how important it is. It is the issue in the campaign."
For example, in the wake of the sovereignty hand-over, NBC's "Meet the Press" discussed Iraq in depth during its July 4 telecast, featuring Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who spent nearly 20 minutes on the topic. In the five weeks since that broadcast, however, the show has not once matched that degree of focus on Iraq. Instead, when the topic is addressed it's invariably in a domestic political context: How will Iraq affect the U.S. election? What's actually happening in Iraq has much less salience. (On the Aug. 8 broadcast of "Meet the Press," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was asked 18 questions; only three were about Iraq, and none were related to current events there.)
Ironically, after the Democrats' convention in Boston, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert, suggesting it was the Democrats who were not anxious to raise the war issue, asserted that Iraq was "the 800-pound elephant in the room that people don't want to talk about." Yet it is "Meet the Press" itself, along with much more of the mainstream press, that has become increasingly fascinated with domestic politics and indifferent to the war.
The political ramifications of the media's recent sluggishness are significant because, aside from military families, most Americans don't have a direct connection with the war. How the press plays -- or downplays -- Iraq between now and November "will have a profound impact on the election," says Phil Trounstine, director of the Survey and Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University. "Less coverage would be good for the president," he observes.
A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests a direct link between reporting on Iraq (or how people treat the news from Iraq) and Bush's political fortunes. During the month of June, just 39 percent of Americans paid very close attention to the news coming out of Iraq, the lowest rate for all of 2004. Over the same period, the survey found, Americans' opinion of Bush, as well as of the situation in Iraq, improved noticeably. On July 14, ABC News' the Note -- the online roundup of the day's must-reads for political junkies -- theorized: "The Bush campaign is counting on the continued absence of a drumbeat of bad news out of Iraq to improve right track/wrong track" polling numbers.
Was there really an absence of bad news from Iraq? Nearly three dozen G.I.'s were killed during the first two weeks of July. On that same July 14 day, Iraq erupted in a new wave of violence. A suicide attacker detonated a massive car bomb near the British Embassy, killing 11 and wounding 40. An insurgent group, probably led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, announced it had beheaded a Bulgarian hostage. Five Iraqis were killed and 21 insurgents were wounded in fierce fighting in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Insurgents killed the governor of Mosul as he was driving in a convoy of vehicles. A gunman assassinated the director general of Iraq's Industry Ministry as he left his Baghdad home. Meanwhile, two G.I.'s were killed that day when their vehicle rolled over.
Few if any of those deadly incidents on July 14 received sustained cable news coverage in America; instead the congressional vote on same-sex marriage was the preferred topic of the day.
The next day, canvassing the media landscape for stories that might affect the November election, the Note made no reference to the carnage in Iraq. Since June 28, that has often been the case with the Note, which perhaps better than any other site accurately captures the shifting moods and priorities of Washington's political press corps. For instance, on July 22, the Note linked to 116 separate stories, drawn from 23 quasi-political categories (9/11 commission, national security, the economy, same-sex marriage, etc.). Not one of them had to do with events in Iraq. And that was just 24 hours after an audacious bombing by insurgents of a Baghdad police station, a deadly attack that was completely overshadowed on cable news outlets by the story that former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger had been under investigation -- for nearly six months -- for breaching protocol at the National Archives while reviewing documents in preparation for the 9/11 commission hearings.
