WASHINGTON —

The U.S. death toll in Iraq had just passed 4,000, but on Monday the most viewed story on Yahoo News was “Oil fluctuates as dollar, stocks rise.” And the most emailed story was: “1986 message in bottle drifts 1,735 miles.”

Five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, Americans’ interest in the war, and press coverage of it, is flagging.

With slugfest for the White House going on and an economy that is plummeting toward recession, there is less and less interest in news, positive or negative, from Iraq, where U.S. soldiers have been fighting since March 20, 2003.

“People see gas going up and the price of their house going down .... It’s more immediate than the Iraq war,” said Bob Stover, managing editor of Florida Today in Melbourne, Florida.

The downturn has been especially sharp in the past six months, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), which measures news content weekly in a mix of US newspapers, websites, and television and radio.

While in all of 2007 the Iraq war occupied an average 15.5% of the “newshole” in the media, in the last quarter it fell to 9%, and then to just 3.9% in the first quarter of 2008, according to PEJ’s Paul Hitlin.

Instead, soaring concern over the U.S. economy and the pitched battles for the Democratic and Republican nominations for the presidential election in November 2008 dominated coverage.

Stories about the US economy filled 1.9% of the newshole last year, according to Hitlin, but hit 8.2% between Jan 1 and March 23 this year.

Even the perils of troubled pop star Britney Spears overshadowed the war since late last year, graphs of news mentions on Google’s Trends Labs show.

That trend was momentarily overturned last week, when U.S. media marked the fifth anniversary of the now unpopular war. Stories looking back and assessments of recent progress piled up.

The Tyndall Report, which measures news coverage on the three big broadcast television networks, said that on March 19 some 40% of their newshole was devoted to Iraq.

But in a week of tough battling between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, and deep turmoil on Wall Street, the war quickly fell off.

Reflecting the lower level of news coverage of the war, a Pew Report released March 12 said that just 28% of adult Americans knew that the US death toll was nearing 4,000, the mark hit on Monday—compared to 31% who knew the level of the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.

In August more than half knew the Iraq toll roughly. “As news coverage of the war has diminished, so too has public interest in news about Iraq,” Pew said.

Ron Nessen, a former NBC television correspondent and White House press secretary at the end of the Vietnam War, attributed the falloff in interest to U.S. successes in quelling violence in Iraq, which has brought the death toll of Americans and Iraqis down from the highs of late 2006—though only to 2005 levels.

“Maybe I’m cynical ... but good news is no news. I think you are seeing a little bit of that effect in Iraq,” Nessen, now a media expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said.

But, he added, after five years, and in the middle of the presidential race, interest has dwindled generally. With no dramatic daily events, “A kind of fatigue sets in.”

Local newspapers across the U.S. ran the story of the 4,000 deaths on Monday, many of them on their front pages. But editors acknowledge a decline in coverage, though they say their readers are still interested—the readers just get the news more on television and online.

Bill Manny, editor of the Idaho Statesman, said his paper still runs three to five stories on Iraq ever week, in a special nation-world section inside the paper. But, he conceded, “What the Pew poll found is true for us.”

The paper sent a reporter and photographer to Iraq in 2003 when some 2,000 Idaho national guardsmen deployed to the war, but since they returned, the coverage has fallen off.

“At some point it all feels similar,” Manny said. The coverage has been replaced in a large part by the real estate market crash, which has hit the Boise, Idaho area hard.

“That’s just what’s on peoples’ minds.”

AFP

8 Comments

• 

  jambon at 08:55 AM JST - 26th March

  News is a product. Get over it.

• 

  jeancolmar at 11:12 AM JST - 26th March

  You can lie the American people into an immoral war and they'll forget about it. Bush baby McCain will get elected and make more wars and the Americans will stupidly follow their media and buy into it.

• 

  adaydream at 01:06 PM JST - 26th March

  When the war was new and the lies were fresh and not debunked, like some of us needed george bush's lies debunked, it was popular.

  I remember it like it was almost yesterday, when only true Americans wore their little flags on their lapels, and if you didn't you were automatically Anti-American.

  When the neocons poured French wine in gutters.

  Oh the media had plenty to write about. Front page stuff.

  But after years of good stories...gets boring after a while I guess. No new lies.

• 

  SuperLib at 02:37 PM JST - 26th March

  The Left's insatiable appetite for Iraq news coverage made every other conflict simply not exist in the media since 2003. I can't even imagine what it's like for people in other conflicts in other parts of the world to open the papers once again and see the most innocuous story from Iraq pushing coverage of their suffering out of the newspapers. Their only crime is that their story didn't mention George Bush. In a world of selective outrage, that's a death sentence in terms of coverage.

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  jambon at 02:45 PM JST - 26th March

  "In a world of selective outrage, that’s a death sentence in terms of coverage."

  Usually released after 3pm U.S. eastern time. We know why.

• 

  Taka313 at 05:56 PM JST - 26th March

  How true Superlib. If only they had a better agent, huh? Maybe they could pool their money together or something.

  Anyway, thanks for the late afternoon chuckle. That one was a keeper.

  Taka

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  SezWho2 at 08:30 PM JST - 26th March

  Why blame Iraqi news coverage on the insatiable appetite of the fictitious "Left"? If this were the reason for the news coverage and if the appetite were truly insatiable, wouldn't the supposedly left-leaning mainstream media continue to pander to the hands that feed it?

  No, the fictitious "Right" has been pretty eager to spin stories of success. Until things like Katrina or the economy came along like a 2x4 up aside his head, the self-styled "War" President has made the fight against terrorism the signature program of his administration. And he has made Iraq the essential battleground for the success of his program.

  I don't know what the front page news is in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, East Timor and other countries in which the US is not fighting, but I don't think it's odd that Iraq has been front page in the US and more or less forced into daily prominence upon countries which constituted the coalition of the willing.

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  Hikozaemon at 10:59 PM JST - 26th March

  Maybe they need to integrate more popular news topics - get Britney to sing a new Iraq News theme song.

  I would suggest "Oops I Bombed it Again"

  Peace

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