The Iraq News Black-Out: How the Press Spent its Summer Vacation

Eric Boehlert: News that Katie Couric would anchor the CBS Evening News from Baghdad this week created a major media splash. After earlier suggesting that type of assignment would be too treacherous for a single mother of two, Couric did an about-face. She stressed that as a journalist she wanted to get a better sense, a firsthand account, of how events were unfolding inside Iraq; to give the story more context.

It's ironic because if CBS had simply aired more reporting from Iraq this summer instead of joining so many other news outlets in walking away from the story, then perhaps Couric wouldn't have had to travel 8,000 miles to find out the facts on the ground.

Couric's high-profile assignment helps underscore the shocking disconnect that has opened up between American news consumers and the mainstream media. The chasm revolves around the fact that public polling indicates consumers are starved for news from Iraq, yet over the summer the mainstream media, and particularly television outlets such as CBS, steadfastly refused to deliver it. The press has walked away from what most Americans claim is the day's most important ongoing news event.

The media's coverage from Iraq has naturally ebbed and flowed over the four-and-a-half years since the invasion. And escalating security concerns in Iraq have made it both more difficult and more expensive for news organization to operate there.

But the pullback we've seen this summer, the chronic dearth of on-the-ground reporting, likely marks a new low of the entire campaign. It's gotten to the point where even monstrous acts of destruction cannot wake the press from its self-induced slumber. ...

That Americans are obsessed about Iraq is no surprise. Polling has consistently shown they think the war is far and away the single most important issue facing the country. And it wasn't like there was no news happening in Iraq between June and August; the months formed the deadliest summer of the war for U.S. military men and women. To say nothing of the approximately 5,000 Iraqi civilians killed this summer.

Politically, the drastic news withdrawal from Iraq carries deep implications, with the debate about America's role in Iraq due to become even more heated next week as Gen. David H. Petraeus testifies before Congress and the White House produces its report on the status in Iraq. But how are Americans supposed to make informed decisions about this country's future role in Iraq if the mainstream media won't inform the public? ...

What's telling is that during the month of July, much of the mainstream media effectively boycotted news from Iraq. Despite sky-high interest among news consumers, stories about the situation in Iraq represented just four percent of the mainstream media's reporting for the month, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index. ...

To put that miniscule 4 percent into perspective: For the month of July, coverage of the fledgling 2008 presidential campaign received nearly three times as much mainstream media news attention as did the unfolding war in Iraq that claimed 79 American lives in July.

In fact, in July Iraq itself rarely ranked among the week's five most-covered stories. And if it weren't for the more robust Iraq reporting that appeared in newspapers and online, events in Iraq probably wouldn't have even ranked among the 10 most-covered stories during the month of July. That's because network and cable television, by contrast, were virtually oblivious to the story.

For instance, over the last seven weeks ABC's Nightline, the network's signature, long-form news program, did not air a single substantive report about Iraq. Not one among the 100-plus news segments the program aired during the stretch was about the situation in Iraq. (That, according to a search of Nightline's transcripts via Nexis.) For instance, on the night after the mammoth suicide bomb blasts in Iraq on August 14, Nightline aired reports about a Mexican stem cell doctor, lullaby singer Lori McKenna, and soccer star David Beckham. That week, Nightline did two separate reports about the earthquake in Peru that killed approximately 500 civilians. But nothing that week from Nightline about the suicide blasts in Iraq that also killed approximately 500 civilians.

(Read Eric's complete story.)