Pew Research: 2007 Media Coverage was Pessimistic in Iraq

Bottom Line Up Front: Journalists in Iraq this year preferred bad news or no news at all. 

The Pew Research Center is reporting on a study on how the press has covered events on the ground in Iraq in 2007. Here are some of the findings:

Through the first 10 months of the year, the picture of Iraq that Americans received from the news media was, in considerable measure, a grim one. Roughly half of the reporting has consisted of accounts of daily violence. And stories that explicitly assessed the direction of the war have tended toward pessimism, according to a new study of press coverage of events on the ground in Iraq from January through October of 2007.

As the year went on, the narrative from Iraq brightened in some ways. The drumbeat of reports about daily attacks declined in late summer and fall, and with that came a decline in the amount of coverage from Iraq overall.

This shift in coverage beginning in June, in turn, coincided with a rising sense among the American public that military efforts in Iraq were going "very" or "fairly well."

The bigger question may be not how the press interprets events but what kinds of events get covered, especially by a press corps whose movements are severely restricted in Iraq by the threat of attack and who are most mobile when embedded with U.S. troops.

Essentially, as public opinion of the war shifted from a negative opinion to a more positive one by September 2007, the overall media coverage declined along with terrorist attacks.

You would expect the opposite to happen. That is, with a safer environment, more embedded reporters would be able to travel with the troops and more reporting made available to the public, whereas a volatile environment would accomodate fewer embedded journalists resulting in fewer stories.  In reality, the opposite occurred. 

The press itself believed it painted an accurate picture of Iraq, according to 70% of journalists.  It's fair to say that many journalists are blind to their own bias.

The Counterinsurgency Manual co-written by GEN Petraeus says this about the media in counterinsurgency:

5-34. The media are ever present and influence perceptions of the COIN environment.

1-12. The information environment is a critical dimension of such internal wars, and insurgents attempt to shape it to their advantage. One way they do this is by carrying out activities, such as suicide attacks, that may have little military value but create fear and uncertainty within the populace and government institutions. These actions are executed to attract high-profile media coverage or local publicity and inflate perceptions of insurgent capabilities. Resulting stories often include insurgent fabrications designed to undermine the government’s legitimacy.

We can only hope the U.S. media overall didn't purposely try to assist the insurgents in their mission.

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Comments

[Spree]

Excellent article Amy!! Voted for it, of course, tried to vote on your other one, but it said I had already voted.. it is funny, its not like we needed to be told what lousy coverage the media gave us about Iraq in 2007, but the fact that numbers are as bad as they are from the graphs should make them ashamed of themselves.

[Amy Proctor]

Spree, agreed. To have Pew Research validate (through Journalism.Org) validates what we already knew. It's worth noting because it indicates the nature of today's press, which is, obivously, overwhelmingly liberal.

[Faultline USA]

A verygod post Amy and I would have a hard time accepting thatthe media didn't purposely try to assist the insurgents in their mission.

[wordsmith]

You would expect the opposite to happen. That is, with a safer environment, more embedded reporters would be able to travel with the troops and more reporting made available to the public, whereas a volatile environment would accomodate fewer embedded journalists resulting in fewer stories. In reality, the opposite occurred.

This comes to mind for me, from Michael Totten's Anbar Awakening PtII:

Violence has declined so sharply in Ramadi that few journalists bother to visit these days. It’s “boring,” most say, and it’s hard to get a story out there – especially for daily news reporters who need fresh scoops every day. Unlike most journalists, I am not a slave to the daily news grind and took the time to embed with the Army and Marines in late summer.

The media has been complicit in shaping the direction and course of this war every bit as much as the planners. They've been active participants, as much a part of the news, as the ones who are supposed to be objectively covering it.