The Theater of War (part three)

A brief review from part one:

Here's a graph from an earlier post, with a couple of additions. This depicts American combat deaths in Iraq from late 2006 to now, as recorded and reported by icasualties.org. For a full explanation of what you're seeing, click here.

The vertical dashed line is at January, 2009 - when Barack Obama became President of the United States. By that point the worst of the Iraq war (barring some future re-ignition - always a concern) was a thing of the past. While the effect was to be determined, the November, 2008 SOFA had already established a 1 July, 2009 pull-out of US combat forces from Iraqi cities. As is now obvious, that date marked the next noticeable downturn in combat deaths. Likewise other future dates, including a December, 2011 deadline for withdraw of all troops, were set. The bottom line - the trajectory of events in Iraq was established, and there was little the newly-elected American president could do to "improve" the situation. (Conversely there was much he could have done to derail the process, to his credit he did not.)

As noted then, the purpose of this series is to examine why the American public's perception of Iraq was so far divorced from the reality on the ground. In part two we looked at the media's own characterization of their coverage through the period of the rapid decline in American combat deaths (and other indicators of violence in Iraq) - the "red section" of the chart above - from the initial announcement of the surge in early 2007...

...I think one thing the press has done is they've learned many lessons during this war. You've had a lot of people on the ground in Iraq. You have people who understand this war at a very basic level. And I think the American public understands this war. And when you have the president coming out and saying things that the public may feel they've heard before and that the press can fact check -- I mean, I remember -- I watched that speech and thought, wait a minute, I remember this happened the first time, or, wait a minute, that happened the second time...

CHARLES GIBSON, ABC ANCHOR: The U.S. military reports the fourth straight month of decline in troop deaths, 66 American troops died in September, each a terrible tragedy for a family, but the number far less than those who died in August. And the Iraqi government says civilian deaths across Iraq fell by half last month.

KURTZ: Joining us now to put this into perspective, Robin Wright, who covers national security for The Washington Post. And CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.

Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?

ROBIN WRIGHT, THE WASHINGTON POST: Not necessarily. The fact is we're at the beginning of a trend -- and it's not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.
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KURTZ: Barbara Starr, CNN did mostly quick reads by anchors of these numbers. There was a taped report on "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT." Do you think this story deserved more attention? We don't know whether it is a trend or not but those are intriguing numbers.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: But that's the problem, we don't know whether it is a trend about specifically the decline in the number of U.S. troops being killed in Iraq. This is not enduring progress.
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KURTZ: But let's say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that's certainly -- that, by any definition, is news.

But not only was that enduring progress, the same trends were indeed specifically reflected in declining numbers other than US troop deaths:

Still, as noted previously, 60% of Americans believed the war in Iraq was going poorly - a measure of the power of media coverage to influence perceptions in America. But (as depicted in the graphs at left) the lines were converging.

For consistency it would be correct to continue our examination of this topic using the media's own analysis of their coverage of Iraq, but a funny thing happened as we moved forward into that orange section on the charts above and violence levels didn't return to high levels - media coverage of Iraq disappeared.

Here's an early report on the trend from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press in November, 2007.

Currently, just 16% of Americans name the Iraq war as the news story that first comes to mind when asked what has been in the news lately. In December and January, a period when U.S. policy toward Iraq and President Bush's troop surge drew extensive news coverage, far greater numbers named the Iraq war as the first story that came to mind.
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In January, roughly a quarter of the overall newshole (26%) in newspapers, TV newscasts, websites and radio was devoted to news about Iraq. In October, the war received only half as much coverage on average (13%), according to data compiled by the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index.

The diminished press coverage of Iraq is an important factor in the falloff in news interest, given that most Americans say they "come across" war news without looking for it, rather than seeking out news about the Iraq war. Overall, 75% of the public says they come across news about the war when they are not actively seeking it out, compared with just 20% who say they go looking for war news.

The track of news coverage for the year shows that the Iraq policy debate has consistently received more coverage than have events in Iraq, according to the PEJ data. Indeed, during the two months in which news organizations have provided the greatest amount of overall news coverage of Iraq - January and September - the bulk of that coverage has been focused on the policy debate rather than on events in Iraq. In January, of the 26% of news coverage on Iraq, 18% was focused on the policy debate, while just 6% of the coverage was of news about events in Iraq. That was the case in September as well, when news organizations devoted more than twice as much coverage to the Iraq policy debate than to events in Iraq (16% vs. 6%).

Despite this imbalance in the coverage, the public has consistently expressed greater interest in news about events in Iraq than it has about the policy debate in Washington.

In recent weeks, media coverage of the war has been minimal. Last week the national media devoted only 2% of its overall coverage to the war.

The death of Hollywood actor Heath Ledger drew a considerable amount of news coverage and news interest. The national news media devoted 4% of its overall coverage to Ledger's death - twice the amount of coverage devoted to either the situation in Iraq or the events along the Egyptian border.

A daily tracking of 65 newspapers by the Associated Press confirms a dip in page-one play throughout the country. In September 2007, the AP found 457 Iraq-related stories (154 by the AP) on front pages, many related to a progress report delivered to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Over the succeeding months, that number fell to as low as 49.

With no solutions in sight, with no light at the end of the tunnel, war fatigue has become a factor. Over the years, a bleak sameness has settled into accounts of suicide bombings and brutal sectarian violence.

Perhaps stories that didn't involve suicide bombers weren't newsworthy. But let's roll back to the autumn of 2007 - when the 2008 election season was getting underway, and Iraq was still the key issue in America. As evidenced by the October, 2007 quotes above (another celebratory example from that time: "We had brave correspondents bringing us the carnage night after night, into our living rooms, what was going one Iraq. And you had the anchors framing the story in such a way that it really punched through") the media narrative had diverged so far from the reality on the ground in Iraq that the only options available at that time were to acknowledge the disparity or drop coverage of Iraq nearly altogether. (In other words, ignore the progress and hope it went away...) For the American media that was really no choice at all - as demonstrated above the decision was obvious, and later attempts to explain it away (or blame the public's 'lack of interest') should be obviously absurd.

The "no solutions in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel" quote would prove especially ironic in June/July 2008, as the American combat death toll in Iraq fell (from 123 in May the previous year) to 8 in July, marking the end of the "orange" phase and the beginning of the next era (the blue shaded area in the chart below) of American operations there.

At this point, Army tour lengths were reduced to pre-surge duration, and negotiations on the Status of Forces Agreement, the document that established the drawdown trajectory continuing in Iraq today, also began in earnest.

But with 75% of Americans saying they only received war news by chance, the media's silent treatment proved highly effective in controlling the population's overall perception of the war in Iraq.

According to Pew Research's poll (click chart above for larger version) , the majority of Americans were still convinced the military effort in Iraq was not going well. (And the number who felt the military effort was going 'not at all well' was double the number who responded 'very well'.)

In all polls (click pollster.com chart at left for larger version), the positive trend in opinions on whether or not the war was going well evident throughout the latter half of 2007 was flat-lined through the first half of 2008.

Back to the American Journalism Review for one more explanation for the decline in Iraq coverage that year:

"We have a woman, an African American and a senior running for president," Miller says. "That is a very big story."

It isn't what she meant, but the woman and the African American were both running on a platform of failure in and withdrawal from Iraq; the truth would not have served them well.

But the reporting (or lack thereof) certainly did. And as the next entry in this series will demonstrate (and as we see to this day), there was more such service to follow.

And more to follow here. Meanwhile, previously in this series:

The end of war

When did the actual last combat brigade return from Iraq?

The Theater of War - part one and part two

Shivers

Americans in Combat in Iraq