Has the media forgotten there is a war in Iraq?
David Bauder of AP asks the age-old question. What if they had a war and the media forgot to cover it?
Remember the war in Iraq?
The question isn’t entirely facetious. The war has nearly vanished from TV screens over the past few months, replaced by stories about the fascinating presidential campaign and faltering economy.
I think we might look at this fact. More GOOD news from Iraq, equals LESS media coverage.
Statistics clearly illustrate the diminished attention. For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for 3 percent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s survey of news coverage. During the same period in 2007, Iraq filled 23 percent of the news hole.
The difference is even more stark on cable news networks: 24 percent of the time spent on Iraq last year, just 1 percent this year.
Well, Bauder refuses to mention the obvious media bias angle here, BUT Ed Morrissey nails it!
Bauder manages to skip over another much more likely reason: the news got better, and the media doesn’t want to cover it. He provides evidence for this in his own analysis:
It’s possible to pinpoint the exact week that the switch turned off. The war averaged 30 minutes per week of coverage last year on the three network evening newscasts up until Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. forces, testified in September about the surge’s progress, according to news consultant Andrew Tyndall. In the last 15 weeks of the year, the broadcasts collectively spent four minutes per week on the war.
Bauder fails to note the political impact of Petraeus’ testimony. That week, Democrats practically queued up in front of television cameras to accuse Petraeus of playing politics, and Hillary Clinton accused him of lying to Congress. The unseemly nature of the attacks on a serving US military commander repulsed Americans, and the discovery that Petraeus was right made it even worse.
Ever since then, the media have sought to play down Iraq. They have pulled back coverage, not because of fatigue, but because they have been proven incorrect in their rush to portray it as a military failure. They have grudgingly noted the progress made in Iraq since last year’s change in strategy and tactics, and barely noticed when Iraq began passing the reconciliation legislation demanded by Congress this year and last.
BINGO!