Iraq Fading

James Fallows notes a Pew research paper that concludes that "News about the Iraq war does not dominate the public's consciousness nearly as much as it did last winter." Public interest in Iraq news has declined, as has the quantity of Iraq coverage in the media. This reminds me that one of my pet theories about the 2004 campaign is that Howard Dean's candidacy was damaged by the mere fact that the primaries were getting closer as the primaries got closer. Coverage of the campaign squeezed out some of the coverage of Iraq and he was hurt by having his signature issue fade from confidence.

The situation today is very different in many respects, but this basic dynamic should hold. More and more and more of the minutes and column-inches dedicated to Serious News is going to be campaign related, so we'll hear less and less about foreign affairs and Iraq will need to share the stage with an apparently worsening situation in Afghanistan, with whatever happens in Pakistan, etc.

Comments

Coverage of the campaign squeezed out some of the coverage of Iraq and he was hurt by having his signature issue fade from confidence.

Confidence for prominence, eh? That's a new one.

An alternate theory is that there's less coverage of Iraq because there's somewhat less bad news from there nowadays.

Posted by southpaw | November 18, 2007 10:02 AM

Yeah, I'd like to think that Iraq is getting less coverage because the media don't like to report things that don't fit their preconceived narative, but to be honest, "If it bleeds it leads", and there isn't nearly as much bleeding going on there.

Good news ain't news, and that's not a matter of ideology, it's a perfectly non-partisan problem with the media.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 18, 2007 10:16 AM

When the Six-Day War broke out in the summer of 1967, news from Vietnam dropped off the front page. This led Marshall McLuhan to formulate a very valuable insight: The media can only pay attention to one war at a time. (I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the exact quote on hand or even on line).

Posted by Jeet Heer | November 18, 2007 10:18 AM

Another alternative theory is that Iraq coverage makes Republicans look bad, so the media take care to downplay it as elections approach, thus avoiding facts that have a liberal bias.

Posted by Gator90 | November 18, 2007 10:21 AM

Don't forget how the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and a relatively quiet winter in terms of attacks by insurgents in Iraq also affected the war as an issue and Dean's fortunes in Iowa and elsewhere in January.

But this time around in 2008, I think the fact that we're still in Iraq with over 150,000 troops some five years later is something that outweighs any good news that may be reported.

Posted by David W. | November 18, 2007 10:31 AM

Hehe I have MY and Andrew Sullivan (though maybe not for long, sheesh) in my RSS reader and for some reason I thought I was reading Andrew until I saw the glaring typo.

And is the Seriousness of the News directly, inversely or not at all related to the Seriousness of the People reporting it?

Posted by aleks | November 18, 2007 10:48 AM

What a diverse group of comments by the early-risers to this one. Allow me to chime in with my own.

First, Matt is being deliberately obtuse if he thinks that the reason Iraq coverage has declined is because of the proximity of the upcoming primaries. It would be entirely possible for the media to throw a spotlight on both, for example, if Iraq dominated the topics during the political debates and rallies. Southpaw and Brett Bellmore note the real reason coverage of Iraq has declined: bad news from Iraq has declined.

Re Jeet Heer's Marshall McLuhan reference: I can't see that name without picturing the great scene with him in Annie Hall. Maybe he had a point about two wars, though Afghanistan still gets occasional press when something bad happens there.

Gator 90: Do you really think that the mainstream media goes out of their way to avoid covering things that make Republicans look bad? And wouldn't coverage of declining violence in Iraq make Republicans who supported the surge look better?

Posted by Fred | November 18, 2007 10:50 AM

Off- topic, but The Times brings in reinforcement for David Brooks. Many younger readers may not remember Lou Cannon. Cannon gained fame and fortune in the 1980s as a political reporter covering Reagan for the L.A. Times in the 1980s mostly through frequent television appearances in which he softened Reagan's image for moderates and liberals while earning scoops from the Administration and later publishing a largely favorable biography -- a case of access journalism that many reporters have emulated since then.

Of course, Cannon does not get to the substance of the argument that Reagan and his political advisers sought to exploit issues of race to advance his and the Republican Party's electoral fortunes in the South. Instead, he argues 1)Reagan personally was not a bigot and 2) the decision to begin the campaign in Neshoba County, MS was not effective politically. None of this negates the broader point that Reagan made tactical appeals to bigots and that his Neshoba County appearance was part of this.

What was most typical of Cannon's career as a Reagan smoother and cannonizer was Cannon's very brief mention of how Reagan was wrong on the most important efforts to remedy America's de jure and de facto systems of racial segregation and discrimination. Cannon goes into detail about all things Reagan did during his life (mostly in the 1930s and 1940s) to demonstrate that Reagan was not a bigot, and then includes the following in a parenthetical:

"(Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18cannon.html?ref=opinion

Posted by Ben Brackley | November 18, 2007 11:05 AM

But Fred, Iraq coverage is dropping even by comparison to, say, 2005 -- when Iraq violence levels were about what they were now. So given the fact that Iraq is a horrible catastrophe (just less horrible than it was at the height of the failed surge, before Sadr declared his cease-fire), one would expect a high level of reporting on the country. Instead we're not hearing much about the "good news" or the "bad news," with every media outlet reporting less on news of any kind from Iraq.

Do you really think that the mainstream media goes out of their way to avoid covering things that make Republicans look bad?

The answer is quite obviously yes, if you look at how the media has gone out of its way to avoid covering things that make Bush, Giuliani, etc look bad while going out of its way to cover made-up "controversies" about the Clintons, Edwards, et al.

Why the media has a pro-Republican bias when reporters don't tend to be Republicans is an interesting question, but I don't see the point of denying the existence of the pro-Republican bias, whatever the reason for it.

Posted by M.A. | November 18, 2007 11:05 AM

M.A.,

The conservative media has been writing about Iraq though -- and lamenting that no one else is. Thirty seconds on Google will find you plenty of examples from The Investor's Business Daily, The WSJ, The NY Post, etc.

"The answer is quite obviously yes, if you look at how the media has gone out of its way to avoid covering things that make Bush, Giuliani, etc look bad while going out of its way to cover made-up "controversies" about the Clintons, Edwards, et al."

How may times did Abu Ghraib appear on the NYT's front page? What about the Katrina coverage that focussed on Bush's alleged ineptitude and spent little-to-no time on Mayor Nagin's gross incompetence (e.g., not using hundreds of school buses to evacuate New Orleans residents)?

Posted by Fred | November 18, 2007 11:25 AM

Dean didn't lose because the primaries got closer. He lost because he was willing to criticize the president at a time when "only the real wacko's" didn't like George Bush.

Simply claiming that the Iraq war didn't make us safer was considered evidence that the man was completely nuts. Suggesting that Bush lied us into war was proof he was a dangerously angry candidate. Then Saddam was captured and that somehow proved Bush was right all along - the war was over... again.

The media attacked him for saying the unthinkable in a time of war. His Democratic rivals attacked him from the right because he was ahead in the polls. The Democratic machine worked against him too.

And, of course, his level of support was never as strong as the polls led us to believe.

Posted by Jinchi | November 18, 2007 11:29 AM

"How may times did Abu Ghraib appear on the NYT's front page? What about the Katrina coverage"

Both appeared far fewer times than the totally-invented non-story of Whitewater.

Posted by Gore/Edwards 08 | November 18, 2007 12:04 PM

The conservative media has been writing about Iraq though -- and lamenting that no one else is.

This has always been a feature of conservative media coverage of Iraq, though. Remember how the Wall Street Journal's website used to have a "good news from Iraq" feature?

There was a period in there, from mid-2006 to mid-2007, when Iraq got so bad that there was literally no "good news" to find. Now we're back to the 2004-5 levels where Iraq is a disaster but conservatives are berating the mainstream media for not reporting the "good news." The difference is, though, that in 2004-5 the media sometimes reported the bad news from Iraq, whereas now they just don't report on Iraq.

Posted by M.A. | November 18, 2007 12:47 PM

Dean didn't lose because "he was willing to criticize the President". He lost because his criticism was total bullshit that ignored over a decade of US/Iraqi history familiar to every reasonably objective voter with an IQ larger than his age. And the media had him pegged as "the presumptive nominee" until he encountered actual voters. The 2004 election was the all-cards-on-the-table referendum on the invasion of Iraq. Get over it.

Iraq is clearly not going to be The Issue in the coming election, and maybe not even one of the top three. More people are being murdered in Brazil and South Africa, which also doesn't get reported. We had lots of soldiers in South Korea and Germany for a long time too without it being considered "news". Currently our casualties are within the statistical norm for the 18-30 age group. Dog bites man.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 18, 2007 1:58 PM

Intransigent Bush-Sharanskyite elected Shiite leadership and the failure of militia-dominated police remain great failures...

But the silence is mostly because the media wishes to bury good news - the most importnant being the Surge worked militarily, our casualties and Iraqi casualties are way down, and Al Qaeda has suffered a catostrophic defeat on their "Central Front" at the hands of Americans AND their brother Sunni Arabs - something the whole Arab world is talking about and bin Laden has tried defending as "rogue AQ elements going too far. Also, we appear to have convinced the Iranians - though a variety of means - to back off sending in explosive devices to kill Americans with.

The important thing is Iraq has gone from frontburner to backburner with voters, except the single issue Hard Left that craves another defeat like Vietnam and another chance to backstab the evil oppressor US troops and our allies.
Voters are more than happy to say Iraq was a disaster we never should have done, Bush is an idiot...but not that because of that we must never elect Bush again and leave in a way that starts a major war involving the whole ME as we cut and run. Iraq is sliding down the list of issues, sure as "more money for Katrina victims" did as a priority as time passes...now its becoming more the economy, jobs, immigration, energy policy, and restoring a balanced foreign policy.

Posted by Chris Ford | November 18, 2007 2:12 PM

M.A.,

The "Good News from Iraq" items on the WSJ editorial page's website were actually written by an Australian blogger named Arthur Chrenkoff. He stopped writing them for work reasons in 2005, as he noted here.

Posted by Fred | November 18, 2007 6:42 PM

See Sullivan on "Iraq Victory Update". It's not just failing to report good news, it's making up lies to help foster an attitude of defeatism.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 19, 2007 3:32 AM