The Incredible Shrinking War

“Oh, are we still at war?”

That was the question asked by Seattle born New York Times writer Timothy Egan in an opinion piece published shortly before Memorial Day. He was startled when the pilot of a flight he was on asked the plane’s passengers to give special consideration to 5 soldiers on the last leg of their 3-day journey back from Iraq.

The pilot requested that the other passengers please keep their seats for a few moments so that the soldiers might leave the plane first and not have to fight the crowd on their way to see their loved ones. The other passengers applauded the soldiers, which seemed to cause more irritation for Egan.

Reflecting the prevailing attitude of the city of his birth leavened by the culture of the New York Times, Egan allowed that he and his employer might find their interest in the war rekindled if they were provided with enough photos of flag-draped coffins. And although he didn’t say so, another Abu Ghraib embarrassment or a poorly sourced rumor of civilian casualties would certainly find its way to the front page.
If only there were more bad news to report, well maybe his employer could find a little more ink to print it. But as it is, the war has been going so well lately that it has slipped below the New York Times’ radar.

The Washington Post was scratching its head at the forgotten war as well. The editors noticed last week that there has been “a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks -- which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war.”

The Post was coming to the realization that we might actually be approaching a successful conclusion to the war that might be worthy of reporting to the American people:

“Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained ‘special groups’ that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is -- of course -- too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments -- and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the "this-war-is-lost" caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).”

Gee. It’s too bad that the Washington Post isn’t a newspaper or something. If it was, then it could take up some of that slack and start getting the word out. Instead it simply warned the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee that good news might overtake his defeatist agenda before the election and he’d better get ready for it.

But the problem is that the Washington Post and just about every other news outlet has shown an inverse correlation between its own reporting and our military’s success. The better we do, the less interest the media has in reporting it. It would be as though the press stopped reporting on WW II in the Pacific after the Miracle at Midway, or on the European theater after D-Day.

The American Journalism Review has actually quantified the media’s lack of interest in reporting on the Iraq War once the surge turned the tide. For the first 10 weeks of 2008, the number of television network news stories reporting on the war declined 92%. News stories on Iraq accounted for 23% of all television news. This year the networks could only squeeze the war into about 3% of their precious airtime. Cable news coverage is even worse. In the last year the cable coverage declined from 24% to 1%.

Newspapers were a bit better. Since the war turned in the United States’ favor, coverage has only declined by 70%, although war news deemed worthy of making it on the front page is down by 89%.

One can go through the library and see that this has not always been the case. The front pages of newspapers during WWII trumpeted allied successes. Compared with the few column inches permitted to war coverage today, WW II seemed to consume acres of page space.

In those days, the media were on our side. And war was not a partisan issue.