The war and the media

During one of my rare trips home to my native Kansas City, Mo., I remember riding by an Iraq war protest, as I would label it, in someone’s richly green and expansive front lawn. There were white crosses, one for each American soldier killed in battle, lining a stretch of land between the property owner’s wooden fence and the road. A sign at the beginning of the stretch with a number in black writing announced precisely how many crosses the passing viewer would lay eyes on. I was riding in the passenger’s seat, giving the display my full attention. I kept wondering when it would end.

I was struck by the power of the display. But it was a novelty – certainly not part of my daily routine.

Something that is part of my daily routine is reading and watching the news, which this past week included my reading about declining media coverage of the Iraq war that has been going on for five years now.

It seems to me that people in the media and people who study the media have agreed on three basic reasons as to why stories about the war have dramatically declined since about the end of last summer – danger, money and public interest.

Danger is perhaps the most understandable reason. Journalists who risk their lives are certainly admirable, but anyone can see why news organizations don’t subject the same people to fatal violence year after year after year.

Of course it costs a lot to cover the war, and in today’s struggling journalism market we recognize that there have to be cuts nearly everywhere.

But the money factor bleeds somewhat into the third, more complex reason – public interest. The experts essentially reached a consensus that stories about Iraq have lately been competing for time and space with stories that are currently more captivating to the public – mainly, those about the presidential race and about the flailing economy.

Iraq is also a subject people are sick of – it has, after all, been around for five years now. And absent any major policy debates, like those that took place before and at the beginning of the surge, people don’t seem to want to hear it.

“This is a story people want to go away,” Marjorie Miller, foreign editor at the Los Angeles Times, said recently on PBS’s NewsHour, “and so we are constantly looking for new and interesting ways to tell the story and keep people engaged.”

With this statement, Miller has put a huge burden on the media’s shoulders – they must keep the public interested in hugely important topics. She also reflects the reality of journalism – increased public interest equals more sales (or today, more clicks), which equals more money.

But with something as important as Iraq, where people are dying every day, is it acceptable to bow to the pressures of simply engaging, with whatever news the media think will work best, a society that can often be so distracted?

And if it’s unacceptable, what is the best way to cover the war effectively?
Covering Iraq is different than covering World War II or Vietnam, as The New York Times’s March 24 story on war coverage pointed out. There is no daily narrative and no draft of young citizens. So daily Iraq coverage would pretty much amount to, as Alex S. Jones of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy put it, “more of the same grim news, day after day.”

However, I think there is a pretty compelling argument that any news, as grim as it may be, that is accurate reporting on a war Americans are paying for deserves daily, if monotonous, coverage. But is monotony – not letting people forget we’re at war – the best way to be effective? Or is it novelty – not allowing people to become jaded by continual war coverage?

If I lived near that house where the crosses were on display, if I passed it every day, I might eventually cease to take notice. I might drive by chatting on my cell phone or singing at the top of my lungs to the song playing from my iPod without even realizing what I was passing.

But I might also notice it every, single time. And I might become more and more and more outraged with every passing by. The path of crosses would grow longer and longer, and I would be reminded of the war and its consequences every day, at least thinking about part of what is happening in the world.

The attention on declining media coverage of the war near its fifth anniversary really brings to the surface the debate of media’s role in our society and how they should best execute that role. The issue really asks us whether editors and produces or readers and viewers should be making the calls about what we see in the news when it comes to a topic of such grave importance.

On my next trip back home, I drove back by the house where I remembered the white crosses had been displayed. They were gone.

Perhaps, without the reimbursement from everyone passing by the protest, buying each individual cross just began to cost too much.