Hat tip to Tim Fowler
As Bad News Dries Up In Iraq, Media Search For It Elsewhere
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007 4:30 PM PT
In an era of thinly veiled media bias, it's probably fitting that as positive reports pour out of Iraq on an almost daily basis, the situation there has virtually disappeared from the radar screens of mainstream news outlets.
For the first time in months — in fact, since the U.S. troop surge was put in place in June — coverage of U.S. policy in Iraq does not rank among the top 10 news stories as tracked by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The percentage of news stories devoted to events in Iraq, moreover, has shrunk to 3%, the lowest since September and barely half the 2007 average. In only three other weeks this year has Iraq coverage been so scanty.
All this in a period when word managed to get out through other sources that:
• U.S. troop casualties have plunged to their lowest level since February 2004, as rocket, mortar and suicide bomb attacks have all hit two-year lows.
• Iraqi civilian casualties are down two-thirds from their peak in December 2006.
• Iraq's government and the U.S. military say al-Qaida has been vanquished in Baghdad, as thousands of Iraqi families return to the capital to rebuild their lives.
• Iraq's government has signed up 20,000 Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites to fight foreign terrorists.
• The U.S. has announced it will remove 3,000 troops, with more to follow in coming months, as the wind-down of the surge begins.
But so it goes with anti-war news organizations that aggressively report setbacks in Iraq but give short, if any, shrift to the positive developments.
It's to the point where some news observers use the absence of news about Iraq as a bellwether of U.S. progress — the old "no news is good news" indicator.
As sufficient as that may be for more savvy news consumers, the question remains of how Iraq coverage — or noncoverage, in the current context — affects attitudes in the population as a whole.
In other words, how can Americans led to believe the war in Iraq is a "mess" or "mistake" or "quagmire" (to use terms repeated often in media accounts) ever see it differently if they hear or read nothing to the contrary?
The latest IBD/TIPP Poll suggests they can't. Of the 924 adults interviewed last week, 58% were hopeful that the U.S. will succeed in Iraq. But that was the same as in August, before results of the surge were known, and little changed from attitudes registered when we asked the same question in May, February and December.
Not only that, but more people think the war has actually been lost. Some 49% believe this to be the case now vs. 46% three and six months ago.
These findings jibe with those of the Pew Research Center, which polled Americans right after Gen. David Petraeus gave his upbeat assessment of the surge in mid-September. Only 16% in that poll said Petraeus' testimony made them more optimistic about the war, while 67% said their views were unchanged.
The rigidity of opinion about prospects in Iraq may reflect a deep split and highly partisan populace that made up its mind about Iraq long ago and is unwilling to change positions.
Republicans, for example, are still 79% hopeful that Iraq will turn out all right — about where they've been all year — and Democrats are 44% hopeful — also little changed over the last 12 months.
If there's any flexibility on the issue, it would probably be found in the middle, from independents. But while their hopeful percentage of 55% in November was up from 51% in August and 49% in May, it's still lower than the 56% registered last December.
It's possible, then, that the lack of improvement in people's views of the Iraq situation reflects a dearth of information on what's happened there since the surge began in February and especially in recent weeks.
The dry-up of coverage evident last week is showing few signs of revival.
On Monday, for example, the Defense Department reported that the number of suicide and other bombings — like the casualty numbers — has nose-dived. Ditto for rocket and mortar attacks. This information went virtually uncovered.
There are some signs, however, that the mainstream media are throwing in the towel on negative coverage of Iraq. The Los Angeles Times, which for most of the last five years seldom went a day without a negative story about Iraq on its front page, has run very few of late.
Moreover, it put the sharp drop in civilian deaths at the top of its front page. And on Monday it even conceded in an editorial that "by every reasonable measure, the U.S. military is making commendable progress in lessening the violence in Iraq." (But this, the editorial concluded, only "created an opportunity to leave — and leave we must.")
The PEJ news coverage index shows Pakistan is now the top story. Not coincidentally, the coverage here — like that of Iran until the surge began to pay dividends — tends to show the president and his policies in a negative light.
Also climbing in the top-story rankings are the economy and related topics such as the credit crunch, the falling dollar, the run-ups in oil and gas, and the drop in the stock market. Here again, all are negative stories that reflect poorly on the administration.
It's worth noting that the economy only infrequently made the top-story list earlier this year, when conditions were perceived to be better, home values had not yet topped and oil was down 25% from its 2006 high.
But then, media have downplayed economic news — or at least positive economic news — since Bush took office. In the early going, the downturn that Bush inherited from Bill Clinton was the "Bush recession." Then, when the expansion resumed, coverage focused on the "jobless recovery." But then job growth accelerated. Then the focus turned to the budget deficit. But then the deficit started shrinking.
Once again, we're in a phase when bad economic news is played up and good economic news is played down, if at all.
On Nov. 2, for example, when the Labor Department reported a solid gain of 166,000 new jobs, ABC and CBS gave it a few seconds (10, to be exact, in the case of CBS), according to Media Research Center data. NBC ignored it altogether.
But when the stock market sold off a few days later, the networks were all over it. With the phrase "DANGER SIGNS" on-screen, NBC's Brian Williams led off the "Nightly News" as follows: "Good evening. The following sounds pretty awful — and we take no pleasure in reporting it — but today Wall Street fell, the U.S. dollar fell, GM is in bad shape and the housing market continues to be in bad trouble."
Little wonder that subsequent readings of consumer confidence, including our own, have shown sharp declines.
This is nothing new, though. Twenty-five years ago — in the middle of another conservative administration — the Applied Economics Research Institute found that nearly 95% of economic statistics were positive, yet 86% were reported negatively.
And four years ago a study by the American Enterprise Institute found that newspapers "tend to give more positive coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the presidency than Republicans."
Then there was the classic case of economic coverage leading up to the 1992 election. George H.W. Bush was the incumbent, and Clinton, Al Gore and 90% of the national media (as later surveys would bear out) wanted him out.
Even though the expansion was in its 18th month and the third quarter was the strongest in three years, 92% of stories written about the economy were negative, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. But as soon as Clinton and Gore were elected, negative stories dried up to 14%.
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