The disappearing Iraq war

During our last couple of classes, we briefly discussed the fact that many U.S. news media outlets were have devoted a great deal of attention to the fifth anniversary, on March 19, of the Iraq war. It's also worth noting, however, that in the two and a half months of 2008 before the anniversary, coverage of Iraq in U.S. media was actually down significantly from 2007, according to a March 16 story by David Bauder of the Associated Press. Bauder reported that in the first 10 weeks of the year, reports on Iraq made up only 3 percent of the television, newspaper and Internet stories being tracked by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a non-partisan research organization that examines media performance. During the same period a year earlier, 23 percent of the stories being tracked by PEJ were about the war. Why the dropoff? PEJ's Mark Jurkowitz notes that stories about the 2008 presidential election seemed to have grabbed the U.S. news media's imagination in early 2008; presidential race stories outnumbered Iraq stories nearly 11-to-one. But a key turning point in coverage came even earlier. Jurkowitz points out that PEJ research found that coverage of the war dropped off after May 24, 2007, the day Congress voted to fund the war without demanding timetables for troop withdrawals. "Journalists covering that struggle concluded that the White House had prevailed and the political fight over Iraq was no longer a hot story," Jurkowitz writes.