Iraq war disappearing in US media

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By Paul Handley From the Agence France Presse

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  • Only 2 U.S. newspapers -- The Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Daily News in New York -- devoted their entire front pages to honoring the 4,000 men and women killed in Iraq
  • The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post left the milestone off their front pages. [MORE]

The US death toll in Iraq had just passed 4,000, but on Monday the most viewed story on Yahoo News was "Oil fluctuates as dollar, stocks rise." And the most emailed story was: "1986 message in bottle drifts 1,735 miles."

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq began, Americans' interest in the war, and press coverage of it, is flagging.

With slugfest for the White House going on and an economy that is plummeting toward recession, there is less and less interest in news, positive or negative, from Iraq, where US soldiers have been fighting since March 20, 2003.

"People see gas going up and the price of their house going down .... It's more immediate than the Iraq war," said Bob Stover, managing editor of Florida Today in Melbourne, Florida.

The downturn has been especially sharp in the past six months, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which measures news content weekly in a mix of US newspapers, websites, and television and radio.

While in all of 2007 the Iraq war occupied an average 15.5 percent of the "newshole" in the media, in the last quarter it fell to nine percent, and then to just 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2008, according to PEJ's Paul Hitlin.

Instead, soaring concern over the US economy and the pitched battles for the Democratic and Republican nominations for the presidential election in November 2008 dominated coverage.

Stories about the US economy filled 1.9 percent of the newshole last year, according to Hitlin, but hit 8.2 percent between January 1 and March 23 this year.

Even the perils of troubled pop star Britney Spears overshadowed the war since late last year, graphs of news mentions on Google's Trends Labs show.

That trend was momentarily overturned last week, when US media marked the fifth anniversary of the now unpopular war. Stories looking back and assessments of recent progress piled up.

The Tyndall Report, which measures news coverage on the three big broadcast television networks, said that on March 19 some 40 percent of their newshole was devoted to Iraq.

But in a week of tough battling between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, and deep turmoil on Wall Street, the war quickly fell off.

Reflecting the lower level of news coverage of the war, a Pew Report released March 12 said that just 28 percent of adult Americans knew that the US death toll was nearing 4,000, the mark hit on Monday -- compared to 31 percent who knew the level of the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.

In August more than half knew the Iraq toll roughly. "As news coverage of the war has diminished, so too has public interest in news about Iraq," Pew said.