G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
The Iraq news blackout: how the press spent its summer vacation
By Eric Boehlert
Created Sep 6 2007 - 9:18am
News that Katie Couric would anchor the CBS Evening News from Baghdad this
week [1] created a major media splash [2]. After earlier suggesting that
type of assignment would be too treacherous for a single mother of two,
Couric did an about-face. She stressed that as a journalist she wanted to
get a better sense, a firsthand account, of how events were unfolding inside
Iraq; to give the story more context.
It's ironic because if CBS had simply aired more reporting from Iraq this
summer instead of joining so many other news outlets in walking away from
the story, then perhaps Couric wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to
find out the facts on the ground.
Couric's high-profile assignment helps underscore the shocking disconnect
that has opened up between American news consumers and the mainstream media.
The chasm revolves around the fact that public polling indicates consumers
are starved for news [3] from Iraq, yet over the summer the mainstream
media, and particularly television outlets such as CBS, steadfastly refused
to deliver it. The press has walked away from what most Americans claim is
the day's most important ongoing news event.
The media's coverage from Iraq has naturally ebbed and flowed over the
four-and-a-half years since the invasion. And escalating security concerns
in Iraq have made it both more difficult and more expensive [4] for news
organization to operate there.
But the pullback we've seen this summer, the chronic dearth of on-the-ground
reporting, likely marks a new low of the entire campaign. It's gotten to the
point where even monstrous acts of destruction cannot wake the press from
its self-induced slumber. Just recall the events of August 14.
That's when witnesses to the four synchronized suicide truck bombs that
detonated in northern Iraq on that day described the collective devastation
unleashed to being like an earthquake, or even the site of a nuclear bomb
[5] explosion; the destruction of one bomb site measured half a mile wide. A
U.S. Army spokesman, after surveying the mass carnage from an attack that
targeted Yazidis, an ancient religious community, called the event
genocidal. Indeed, more than 500 Iraqis were killed, more than 1,500 were
wounded, and 400 buildings were destroyed.
The bombings in the towns of Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar marked the
deadliest attack of the entire Iraq war. In fact, with a death toll topping
500, the mid-August bombing ranks as the second deadliest terror strike ever
recorded [6] in modern times. Only the coordinated attacks on 9-11 have
claimed more innocent lives. Yet the press failed to put the story in
context.
Early news dispatches about the attacks (which pegged the early death toll
at a smaller, but still remarkable, 175) were posted [7] around 6 p.m. ET on
August 14. Yet that night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the hour-long news
program that airs at 10 p.m., the carnage from Iraq garnered just a brief
report, and that was relegated to the "360 Bulletin," halfway through the
program; a report on a playground catching on fire due to spontaneous
combustion of decomposing wood chips was given slightly more airtime and,
unlike the suicide bombings, prompted a reaction from host Cooper himself:
"That's incredible. I never heard of that." Less surprising was the fact
that a pro-Bush outlet such as The Drudge Report, as late as 10:30 p.m. that
night, was ignoring the massive blast headline, or that Fox News gave the
gruesome attack just three mentions all evening.
The next day, as noted [8] by the Columbia Journalism Review, the story was
placed on A6 in both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and Page
4 of USA Today. On that evening's NBC Nightly News, the historic massacre
from Iraq was not even tapped as the day's most important story. (Ongoing
mortgage woes led the broadcast that night.)
The media's tepid response to the cataclysmic event was telling. It simply
underscored how Iraq fatigue afflicts American newsrooms -- but not American
households.
That Americans are obsessed about Iraq is no surprise. Polling has
consistently shown they think the war is far and away the single most
important issue [9] facing the country. And it wasn't like there was no news
[10] happening in Iraq between June and August; the months formed the
deadliest summer of the war for U.S. military men and women. To say nothing
of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi civilians killed [11] this summer.
Politically, the drastic news withdrawal from Iraq carries deep
implications, with the debate about America's role in Iraq due to become
even more heated next week as Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies before
Congress and the White House produces its report on the status in Iraq. But
how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions about this country's
future role in Iraq if the mainstream media won't inform the public?
Also, no news from Iraq has usually meant good news for the Bush White
House; whenever Iraq has faded from view [12] in recent years, Bush and his
policies often received a bump in the polls. For instance, in July, the
results from a CBS/New York Times poll raised eyebrows [13] when it found
that support for the invasion of Iraq -- which for years had been
tumbling -- suddenly experienced an uptick, from 35 to 42 percent.
What's telling is that during the month of July, much of the mainstream
media effectively boycotted news from Iraq. Despite sky-high interest among
news consumers, stories about the situation in Iraq represented just four
percent of the mainstream media's reporting for the month, according to the
Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index. The index
catalogs how much time and space 48 major news outlets devote to various
topics each week. The index is broken down by medium: radio, newspapers,
online, cable, and network television. (Click here [14] to the see the news
outlets monitored by the Coverage Index.)
To put that miniscule 4 percent into perspective: For the month of July,
coverage of the fledgling 2008 presidential campaign received nearly three
times as much mainstream media news attention as did the unfolding war in
Iraq that claimed 79 American lives in July.
In fact, in July Iraq itself rarely ranked among the week's five
most-covered stories. And if it weren't for the more robust Iraq reporting
that appeared in newspapers and online, events in Iraq probably wouldn't
have even ranked among the 10 most-covered stories during the month of July.
That's because network and cable television, by contrast, were virtually
oblivious to the story.
For instance, over the last seven weeks ABC's Nightline, the network's
signature, long-form news program, did not air a single substantive report
about Iraq. Not one among the 100-plus news segments the program aired
during the stretch was about the situation in Iraq. (That, according to a
search of Nightline's transcripts via Nexis.) For instance, on the night
after the mammoth suicide bomb blasts in Iraq on August 14, Nightline aired
reports about a Mexican stem cell doctor, lullaby singer Lori McKenna, and
soccer star David Beckham. That week, Nightline did two separate reports
about the earthquake in Peru that killed approximately 500 civilians. But
nothing that week from Nightline about the suicide blasts in Iraq that also
killed approximately 500 civilians.
Instead of Iraq, here are some of the news stories Nightline staffers
devoted time and energy to during that seven-week summer span:
a.. The popularity of organic pet food.
b.. The favorite songs of Pete Wentz, bassist for the pop/rock band Fall
Out Boy.
c.. The folding of supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News.
d.. The rise of urban McMansions.
e.. The death of the postcard.
f.. The commercial battle between Barbie and Bratz dolls.
g.. The nerd stars of the movie Superbad.
News consumers remained starved for reports from Iraq
The media's dramatic news withdrawal from Iraq might be justified, on some
level, if evidence showed that Americans had grown bored of the war in Iraq.
Journalism is a public service but it's also a business and editors and
producers are always trying to find the right mix of news that consumers
need and news they want to have. If Americans were zoning out Iraq, then why
should news outlets try to force-feed updates to news consumers?
But the truth is Americans are borderline obsessed with news from Iraq. And
it's the mainstream media that's abdicated their news gathering
responsibility.
That stunning disconnect becomes obvious when comparing the PEJ's weekly
News Coverage Index with the Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press' weekly News Interest Index, a survey [15] "aimed at gauging the
public's interest in and reaction to major news events." Pew asks 1,000
adults which story in the news they are following "very closely" that week.
The two weekly surveys simultaneously gage which stories news consumers are
paying very close attention to and which stories news editors and producers
are paying close attention to (i.e. which stories they're covering).
As I mentioned, the disconnect is absolutely shocking when it comes to the
situation in Iraq, which as a news story consistently ranked near the top of
the News Interest Index this summer, while simultaneously ranking near the
bottom of the News Coverage Index.
For instance, at the outset of the summer for the work week of June 24-29
[16], 32 percent of adults were following the situation in Iraq "very
closely," but the story represented only 4 percent of that week's news
hole -- a 28-point gap. That same trend played out all summer, with that gap
often ballooning:
% following situation in Iraq "very closely" % of national news hole
devoted to Iraq war % Gap
July 1-6 [17] 36 3 33
July 8-13 [18] 25 4 21
July 15-20 [19] 28 6 22
July 22-27 [20] 28 3 25
July 29-August 3 [21] 29 5 24
August 5-10 [22] 36 5 31
August 12-17 [23] 33 5 28
August 19-24 [24] 34 5 29
On average during the summer, 31 percent paid very close attention to the
situation in Iraq, making it far and away the hottest news topic throughout
the season. Yet on average, the situation in Iraq represented just 4.5
percent of the overall news coverage. No other story, as tracked by the News
Interest Index and the News Coverage Index, produced such a consistently
wide disparity between June and September.
In other words, week after week a clear plurality of Americans said the
situation in Iraq was a story they followed very closely. Yet week after the
week much of the mainstream press responded with a so-what shoulder shrug.
And nobody was shrugging their shoulders more often than television news
producers, who all but gave up covering the war in Iraq this summer. For the
week [25] of August 5-10, for instance, when news consumer interest in Iraq
peaked at 36 percent, the story didn't even represent 3 percent of cable
television's news hole.
Or this: In the second quarter [26] of 2007 (the most recent quarterly data
available from PEJ), MSNBC devoted just 1.5 percent of its overall news
coverage to documenting events in Iraq.
But hey, now that Katie Couric has rediscovered Iraq, perhaps the rest of
the press will follow.
A footnote: For those who wade through the News Coverage Index data, you'll
note a category dubbed "Iraq Policy" which has received lots of mainstream
media attention this summer, often topping the News Coverage Index. But
that's not to be confused with reporting about the Iraq war itself. Reports
about the Beltway debate over Iraq policy are much different than reports
about the situation in Iraq. The policy debate has mostly been covered as a
horserace: Do Democrats have the votes to end the war? Can Bush still keep
anxious Republicans in line? It's what the Beltway press loves to obsess
over -- who's up, who's down, and what the 2008 implications are. Americans,
though, are more interested in a war, now in its 53rd month, being waged in
the Persian Gulf that has claimed nearly 4,000 American lives and is costing
the U.S. Treasury $1 billion each week to fight.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Eric Boehlert
Created Sep 6 2007 - 9:18am
News that Katie Couric would anchor the CBS Evening News from Baghdad this
week [1] created a major media splash [2]. After earlier suggesting that
type of assignment would be too treacherous for a single mother of two,
Couric did an about-face. She stressed that as a journalist she wanted to
get a better sense, a firsthand account, of how events were unfolding inside
Iraq; to give the story more context.
It's ironic because if CBS had simply aired more reporting from Iraq this
summer instead of joining so many other news outlets in walking away from
the story, then perhaps Couric wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to
find out the facts on the ground.
Couric's high-profile assignment helps underscore the shocking disconnect
that has opened up between American news consumers and the mainstream media.
The chasm revolves around the fact that public polling indicates consumers
are starved for news [3] from Iraq, yet over the summer the mainstream
media, and particularly television outlets such as CBS, steadfastly refused
to deliver it. The press has walked away from what most Americans claim is
the day's most important ongoing news event.
The media's coverage from Iraq has naturally ebbed and flowed over the
four-and-a-half years since the invasion. And escalating security concerns
in Iraq have made it both more difficult and more expensive [4] for news
organization to operate there.
But the pullback we've seen this summer, the chronic dearth of on-the-ground
reporting, likely marks a new low of the entire campaign. It's gotten to the
point where even monstrous acts of destruction cannot wake the press from
its self-induced slumber. Just recall the events of August 14.
That's when witnesses to the four synchronized suicide truck bombs that
detonated in northern Iraq on that day described the collective devastation
unleashed to being like an earthquake, or even the site of a nuclear bomb
[5] explosion; the destruction of one bomb site measured half a mile wide. A
U.S. Army spokesman, after surveying the mass carnage from an attack that
targeted Yazidis, an ancient religious community, called the event
genocidal. Indeed, more than 500 Iraqis were killed, more than 1,500 were
wounded, and 400 buildings were destroyed.
The bombings in the towns of Tal al-Azizziyah and Sheikh Khadar marked the
deadliest attack of the entire Iraq war. In fact, with a death toll topping
500, the mid-August bombing ranks as the second deadliest terror strike ever
recorded [6] in modern times. Only the coordinated attacks on 9-11 have
claimed more innocent lives. Yet the press failed to put the story in
context.
Early news dispatches about the attacks (which pegged the early death toll
at a smaller, but still remarkable, 175) were posted [7] around 6 p.m. ET on
August 14. Yet that night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, the hour-long news
program that airs at 10 p.m., the carnage from Iraq garnered just a brief
report, and that was relegated to the "360 Bulletin," halfway through the
program; a report on a playground catching on fire due to spontaneous
combustion of decomposing wood chips was given slightly more airtime and,
unlike the suicide bombings, prompted a reaction from host Cooper himself:
"That's incredible. I never heard of that." Less surprising was the fact
that a pro-Bush outlet such as The Drudge Report, as late as 10:30 p.m. that
night, was ignoring the massive blast headline, or that Fox News gave the
gruesome attack just three mentions all evening.
The next day, as noted [8] by the Columbia Journalism Review, the story was
placed on A6 in both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and Page
4 of USA Today. On that evening's NBC Nightly News, the historic massacre
from Iraq was not even tapped as the day's most important story. (Ongoing
mortgage woes led the broadcast that night.)
The media's tepid response to the cataclysmic event was telling. It simply
underscored how Iraq fatigue afflicts American newsrooms -- but not American
households.
That Americans are obsessed about Iraq is no surprise. Polling has
consistently shown they think the war is far and away the single most
important issue [9] facing the country. And it wasn't like there was no news
[10] happening in Iraq between June and August; the months formed the
deadliest summer of the war for U.S. military men and women. To say nothing
of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi civilians killed [11] this summer.
Politically, the drastic news withdrawal from Iraq carries deep
implications, with the debate about America's role in Iraq due to become
even more heated next week as Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies before
Congress and the White House produces its report on the status in Iraq. But
how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions about this country's
future role in Iraq if the mainstream media won't inform the public?
Also, no news from Iraq has usually meant good news for the Bush White
House; whenever Iraq has faded from view [12] in recent years, Bush and his
policies often received a bump in the polls. For instance, in July, the
results from a CBS/New York Times poll raised eyebrows [13] when it found
that support for the invasion of Iraq -- which for years had been
tumbling -- suddenly experienced an uptick, from 35 to 42 percent.
What's telling is that during the month of July, much of the mainstream
media effectively boycotted news from Iraq. Despite sky-high interest among
news consumers, stories about the situation in Iraq represented just four
percent of the mainstream media's reporting for the month, according to the
Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index. The index
catalogs how much time and space 48 major news outlets devote to various
topics each week. The index is broken down by medium: radio, newspapers,
online, cable, and network television. (Click here [14] to the see the news
outlets monitored by the Coverage Index.)
To put that miniscule 4 percent into perspective: For the month of July,
coverage of the fledgling 2008 presidential campaign received nearly three
times as much mainstream media news attention as did the unfolding war in
Iraq that claimed 79 American lives in July.
In fact, in July Iraq itself rarely ranked among the week's five
most-covered stories. And if it weren't for the more robust Iraq reporting
that appeared in newspapers and online, events in Iraq probably wouldn't
have even ranked among the 10 most-covered stories during the month of July.
That's because network and cable television, by contrast, were virtually
oblivious to the story.
For instance, over the last seven weeks ABC's Nightline, the network's
signature, long-form news program, did not air a single substantive report
about Iraq. Not one among the 100-plus news segments the program aired
during the stretch was about the situation in Iraq. (That, according to a
search of Nightline's transcripts via Nexis.) For instance, on the night
after the mammoth suicide bomb blasts in Iraq on August 14, Nightline aired
reports about a Mexican stem cell doctor, lullaby singer Lori McKenna, and
soccer star David Beckham. That week, Nightline did two separate reports
about the earthquake in Peru that killed approximately 500 civilians. But
nothing that week from Nightline about the suicide blasts in Iraq that also
killed approximately 500 civilians.
Instead of Iraq, here are some of the news stories Nightline staffers
devoted time and energy to during that seven-week summer span:
a.. The popularity of organic pet food.
b.. The favorite songs of Pete Wentz, bassist for the pop/rock band Fall
Out Boy.
c.. The folding of supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News.
d.. The rise of urban McMansions.
e.. The death of the postcard.
f.. The commercial battle between Barbie and Bratz dolls.
g.. The nerd stars of the movie Superbad.
News consumers remained starved for reports from Iraq
The media's dramatic news withdrawal from Iraq might be justified, on some
level, if evidence showed that Americans had grown bored of the war in Iraq.
Journalism is a public service but it's also a business and editors and
producers are always trying to find the right mix of news that consumers
need and news they want to have. If Americans were zoning out Iraq, then why
should news outlets try to force-feed updates to news consumers?
But the truth is Americans are borderline obsessed with news from Iraq. And
it's the mainstream media that's abdicated their news gathering
responsibility.
That stunning disconnect becomes obvious when comparing the PEJ's weekly
News Coverage Index with the Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press' weekly News Interest Index, a survey [15] "aimed at gauging the
public's interest in and reaction to major news events." Pew asks 1,000
adults which story in the news they are following "very closely" that week.
The two weekly surveys simultaneously gage which stories news consumers are
paying very close attention to and which stories news editors and producers
are paying close attention to (i.e. which stories they're covering).
As I mentioned, the disconnect is absolutely shocking when it comes to the
situation in Iraq, which as a news story consistently ranked near the top of
the News Interest Index this summer, while simultaneously ranking near the
bottom of the News Coverage Index.
For instance, at the outset of the summer for the work week of June 24-29
[16], 32 percent of adults were following the situation in Iraq "very
closely," but the story represented only 4 percent of that week's news
hole -- a 28-point gap. That same trend played out all summer, with that gap
often ballooning:
% following situation in Iraq "very closely" % of national news hole
devoted to Iraq war % Gap
July 1-6 [17] 36 3 33
July 8-13 [18] 25 4 21
July 15-20 [19] 28 6 22
July 22-27 [20] 28 3 25
July 29-August 3 [21] 29 5 24
August 5-10 [22] 36 5 31
August 12-17 [23] 33 5 28
August 19-24 [24] 34 5 29
On average during the summer, 31 percent paid very close attention to the
situation in Iraq, making it far and away the hottest news topic throughout
the season. Yet on average, the situation in Iraq represented just 4.5
percent of the overall news coverage. No other story, as tracked by the News
Interest Index and the News Coverage Index, produced such a consistently
wide disparity between June and September.
In other words, week after week a clear plurality of Americans said the
situation in Iraq was a story they followed very closely. Yet week after the
week much of the mainstream press responded with a so-what shoulder shrug.
And nobody was shrugging their shoulders more often than television news
producers, who all but gave up covering the war in Iraq this summer. For the
week [25] of August 5-10, for instance, when news consumer interest in Iraq
peaked at 36 percent, the story didn't even represent 3 percent of cable
television's news hole.
Or this: In the second quarter [26] of 2007 (the most recent quarterly data
available from PEJ), MSNBC devoted just 1.5 percent of its overall news
coverage to documenting events in Iraq.
But hey, now that Katie Couric has rediscovered Iraq, perhaps the rest of
the press will follow.
A footnote: For those who wade through the News Coverage Index data, you'll
note a category dubbed "Iraq Policy" which has received lots of mainstream
media attention this summer, often topping the News Coverage Index. But
that's not to be confused with reporting about the Iraq war itself. Reports
about the Beltway debate over Iraq policy are much different than reports
about the situation in Iraq. The policy debate has mostly been covered as a
horserace: Do Democrats have the votes to end the war? Can Bush still keep
anxious Republicans in line? It's what the Beltway press loves to obsess
over -- who's up, who's down, and what the 2008 implications are. Americans,
though, are more interested in a war, now in its 53rd month, being waged in
the Persian Gulf that has claimed nearly 4,000 American lives and is costing
the U.S. Treasury $1 billion each week to fight.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson