Tonight's post has been evolving all day. And the evolution has gone from bad to worse.
Earlier today while reading the New York Times -- the print edition, whilst basking in the sun in my backyard -- I noticed that the report of the deaths of four more US soldiers in Iraq was exiled to page 9. And so I thought I would blog about how Iraq has fallen out of the news.
When I sat down at my computer this evening to put blog to electrons, I first checked out tomorrow's New York Times -- digital edition and the sun has long since set -- to find a bit of bitter irony. The business section has an article titled, "The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?"
Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. [Link]
A perfect fit for what I already wanted to write about. And so the post evolved.
I decided to make a quick check of my email before writing. There I found two messages announcing the fact that US deaths in Iraq had just reached a new milestone number: 4,000. Another grim evolutionary turn for my once-modest blog entry.
[NYT does have an early AP wire story about this on their home page now.]
The business section article speculates about possible reasons for the declining media coverage. Here's the first explanation, Excuse A:
The drop in [media] coverage parallels — and may be explained by — a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq “very closely” in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall.
Hold on. The paragraph begins with a conclusion, then cites statistics that may just as well support an exactly opposite conclusion. Let's rework that first sentence:
The drop in coverage parallels — and may be explained by — a decline in public interest.
The decline in public interest parallels — and may be explained by — a drop in coverage.
I think the second iteration is the right one. Perhaps the Times would like to test the theory by putting Iraq back on page 1?
Today's US deaths were accompanied by day-long mortar attacks on the Green Zone and more than sixty Iraqi deaths. Meanwhile, continuing to explain away the dearth of media coverage, the Times goes on . . .
He [Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution] argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better.
You bet. The news just keeps getting better and better. At this rate it won't be long before the news about Iraq is so good that it disappears entirely. And then there'll be no need to even mention the 5,000th death.
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