As Iraq War Pushes On, Media Coverage Shifts

JEFFREY BROWN:

The same study that Ray [Suarez] just cited about public awareness of the death toll in Iraq also took a hard look at the media coverage of the conflict.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the number of news stories about Iraq had fallen off dramatically since last year. The study shows the percentage of news stories devoted to the war dropped from an average of 15 percent of all stories last July to just 3 percent in February of this year.

We discuss the findings and their implications now with Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism; Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times; Terry McCarthy, ABC News correspondent based in Baghdad, he joins us tonight from New York; and Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, a magazine about the newspaper business, he's also the author of a book about the media and Iraq called "So Wrong for So Long."

Well, Mark Jurkowitz, let me start with you. You could flesh out the study a little bit more for us. When exactly did we see this falloff in the coverage? And how did that change the stories?

MARK JURKOWITZ, Project for Excellence in Journalism: We really saw it — it happened dramatically at the end of last year. And there were really two major components of the story that are worth talking about when you're talking about Iraq coverage.

One of them is the political debate that was based in Washington that was really about control of the war, the purse strings of the war, the battle between the congressional Democrats and the White House over who was going to control the politics of the war.

You have to remember, in 2006, we had a new Democratic Congress that got elected. They thought they had a mandate to end the war. The president comes in with a surge in January. The media sees a real battle royale shaping up over who's going to control strategy and purse strings, and coverage of that political debate was actually the highest component of the Iraq coverage that we studied.

Somewhere in the middle of last year, it became evident, as the president continued to win legislative battles and get funding for the war without timetables for withdrawals or deadlines, that that battle had effectively been won. And that kind of coverage began to drop off fairly dramatically.

By the end of last year, as the statistics showed, in the late fall, we started to see the surge working, to the extent that casualties on the ground and the violence inside Iraq began to diminish. When that began to diminish, so, too, did coverage of events inside that.

So you put the two of them together. And if you actually compared where we were in the first three months of 2007 and where we are in the first three months of 2008, we've got literally about 15 percent as much Iraq coverage this year as we had at this time last year.