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Media re-discovers Iraq

In 2006, the Tyndall Report notices a bigger coverage of the Iraq war in the American media than in 2005. Hurricane Katrina also is still among the leaders in the battle for airtime minutes.

For 20 years, the report of Andrew Tyndall measures each evening which topics get the most coverage among the three leading evening news broadcasts and outlines the results in a yearly balance sheet.

While Hurricane Katrina topped that list in 2005 with 1,153 total airtime minutes on ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News, and was leading the Iraq war, it only got the attention of 367 minutes in 2006 and finished third in the standings. Interestingly enough, with 190 minutes NBC devoted way more attention to the recovering of the region than CBS with merely 75 minutes.

Hurricane Katrina especially had to give way to the coverage of the ongoing struggle of American forces in Iraq. While the coverage of that conflict steadily declined each year since the invasion in 2003 (1,602 min. in 2003, 1,352 in 2004, 879 in 2005), it rose back to 1,131 minutes in 2006 and lead the field with a big gap to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict which came in second with 578 minutes. Iraq-related topics like sectarian violence (187 min.) and the attacks on journalists (170 min.) finished seventh and eight in the 2006 ranking.

In general, it was the Tsunami in South-east Asia, the death of Pope John Paul II, and the bombing attacks in London that got most of the coverage in American evening news programs in 2005. Last year, however, the attention is more on national topics like the aftermath of 9/11, the rise of gasoline prices, and the debate about illegal immigrants.

The nuclear weapons program of North Korea received 30 minutes more attention than the efforts of the Iranian President to start one. The biggest difference among the three channels was the coverage of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. NBC Nightly News reported 73 minutes about the games, whereas CBS only devoted 4 total minutes. NBC had the exclusive rights and Nightly News-Anchorman Brian Williams reported some of the shows live from Italy.

How much the Iraq war is back in the awareness of news shows and therefore the public, becomes clear when you look at the airtime of the individual correspondents on those programs. Richard Engel, Baghdad- and Beirut-correspondent of NBC is the only international correspondent among the Top 15 of all three news channels and their reporters. In 2004, two international reporters made that list - none of them did in 2005.

David Martin (CBS) and Jim Miklaszewski (NBC) are two prominent Pentagon-correspondents in the Top 5, whereas this group only got one of their peers in the Top 15 in 2005 (Martha Raddatz (ABC) on No. 11). The most airtime, as always, went to the three White House correspondents of the major networks.

It should come to no surprise that the conflict in Iraq is back in the minds of the press. After three years of declining coverage, the major networks and cable news shows have realized that this conflict is not anywhere near to being solved and that a lot of decision-makers have simply made the wrong decisions for many years. Finally, one could argue, those mistakes get the coverage they deserve.

Still, there are a lot of questions that need to be asked, starting with why one can see a decreasing coverage over the years and what went different from 2003 to 2005 that justified such a decline. At the end, it is debatable if a turnaround in the media could have prevented such mistakes from happening for this long period of time by making the public aware of it.

In conclusion, one finds that neither side is looking like a winner in this story. While one side got into this crisis and currently tries desperately to get out of it, the other side recognized this crisis too late and is now anxious to catch up on what it missed. The criticism appears late, but at least it appears.

Discussion:

1) How do you explain a decline in the coverage of the Iraq conflict from 2003 to 2005 and should the media be held accountable for “missing the story”?

2) Is it surprising that national issues got most of the coverage in 2006, whereas there seemed to be a bigger focus on international news in 2005?

3) What influence does the media have on decision makers and do you believe a better reporting about the wrong-doings would have prevented some of them from happening?

Additional Information:
> Tyndall Report Website with archive to search for topics and people
> Electronic Iraq’s view on Tyndall’s findings
> Worldpress.org Top Ten Stories of 2006

Works Cited:
Tyndall, Andrew. “Tyndall Report 3 Jan. 2007. 4 Jan. 2007