Media: War in Iraq a "Lifestyle Issue," Not News

Posted by Philip Barron, Waveflux.net at 8:24 AM on June 11, 2008.

At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website, a recent Editor’s Desk response to criticism of the paper’s Iraq coverage wasn’t much better than no response at all.

A retired Globe-Democrat staffer called to criticize our day-in and day-out reporting on the war in Iraq. Not enough, not prominent enough, she said.

Five years into the war, is an 8-inch story in the middle of Page A5 enough?

Points for snark, none for actually addressing the question on “day-in and day-out reporting.” The editor goes on to recount the obvious - “war news is more likely to be inside the main news section than on the front page” - as though the mere fact supplied its own explanation. Again:

In terms of news and interest, are those developments in Iraq worth greater display? Obviously, our news editors and page designers last night thought not.

Yes, obviously.

The reader who criticized the paper - a former staffer at the long-dead Globe-Democrat, a conservative rival to the P-D - charged the Post-Dispatch with liberal bias. That charge doesn’t hold water: you’d think that a media source run by flaming liberals would be more likely rather than less to run Iraq news.

The matter of unsatisfactory coverage of the war from media outlets in general, both print and electronic, is broader than the stories that appear - or don’t - in any single newspaper, regardless of ideological slant. A recent Zogby study commissioned by the Poynter Institute revealed than while 75 percent of those polled felt “well-informed” about Iraq, the majority were still not satisfied with the coverage they were getting:

Among participants of the online survey, conducted by Zogby International, 47 percent described the coverage as “poor” and 33 percent rated it “fair.” About 16 percent called it “good,” while 2 percent regarded it as “excellent.” Of those surveyed, 90 percent describe themselves as active consumers of news.

The study reveals a deep dissatisfaction with war coverage and provides information journalists can use to learn more about what the public wants.

In mid-March, a study by the Pew Research Center found that the number of Iraq news accounts had dropped dramatically since last year. The report cited “newsroom cutbacks and decreasing resources” and the dangerous conditions inside Iraq as factors. Later that month, media analysts convened on PBS’ NewsHour to discuss the study. Terry McCarthy of ABC News dismissed the current situation in Iraq as “an incremental story…not very dramatic…more a lifestyle issue than a huge political story.” Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, took issue with that assessment:

I think you still have to look at yourself in the mirror and sort of say, “This is the story of our time; this is still the tragedy of our time; this is still the worst episode that the United States has been involved in, in probably my lifetime or at least going back to Vietnam.”

And the coverage calls for being incredibly nimble, for being incredibly creative, and for devoting the inches on the front pages and the minutes on the network broadcast to tell that story.

A further - and telling - point from Mitchell:

People talk about the public’s lack of interest these days, but the public often, right or wrong, takes their cues from the media. So if the media puts the stories on page 29 or doesn’t run the stories at all, the public may take a cue that Iraq isn’t that important anymore. And so I think there’s a certain amount of justification going on there.

This is a point that worthy of a fuller response from editors than we saw in the Editor’s Desk posting. If journalism is indeed the rough draft of history, then that daily accounting should be broad and sustained and visible to readers and viewers, who are asking for more coverage of Iraq.

The Post-Dispatch editor explains the paper’s stance rather economically:

Incremental news is incremental news.

The response from many citizens can also be neatly summarized: Hey, there’s a war on.