No News Is Bad News In Iraq

NY TIMES: Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner

Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.

Lara Logan told Jon Stewart recently that war news is hard to get onto TV.
“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”

Ms. Logan let a sly just-kidding smile sneak through as she spoke, but her point was serious. Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.

“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

181 minutes of coverage in 2008. That's an average of one minute per day.

Remember when the race to take over Baghdad started? Embedded reporters were monitoring the progress trrops were making, Baghdad Bob was on Iraqi television telling the Iraqi pepole that all was under control while US troops were practically in the background giving him rabbit ears and posing for the camera. The daily video shots of "Shock and Awe" played on the airwaves so much, you would have thought it was a commercial for the evening fireworks at Disneyworld.

But since things haven't gone as planned, or in this case not planned at all, the coverage has diminished to the point that you wouldn't know we were at "war" in the first place. And people wonder why there aren't mass protests in the streets like there were during Vietnam. Back then, Vietnam was all over the television. It was nonstop. The combat coverage was graphic in nature, with wounded soldiers being shown airlifted out of combat zones. There wasn't a government ordered blackout on flag draped coffins coming home to families for final closure of a lost loved one. The propaganda coming from the White House now is even worse than whatever Baghdad Bob was going on about over five years ago.

Looks like these days, no news is bad news in Iraq.