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4000 Bodies Fall in the Forest
Have you forgotten the war in Iraq yet?
No?
Well, we all know that the people who hang out on this blog are a rather over-wrought bunch. And unlike too many of their fellow citizens, they suffer from a damaging neurological impairment: they remember stuff. Not just phone numbers, or the name of the dog, or what time the subway shuts down at night (for you people in DC, where nightlife does end).
If you take political polls about recent events on their face, most Americans do not remember much that has happened; or to put the best face on it, they only remember things that happened more than a few days ago through the lens of what they have heard or seen in the last 2 to 3 days. Anything older than that, who the hell knows.
There are lots of explanations floating around about why the American people are walking around in this amnesical haze. But in such an environment, the mass media become hyper-important. Repeated daily news coverage of a person or an event keeps stimulating the production of new memories in those with the most fleeting memories, like rewinding a clock every day, so that it keeps on ticking.
But if the media stop the stimulus, the memory starts fading, while more recent input about other topics become the object of accessible memory.
What happens if the media turns off the spigot? In the story below from the March 24 New York Times, (which ran in the Business section, far from the front page or the news section of the paper) there are references to a study of coverage of the war in Iraq by the Project for Excellence in Journalism:
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.
I find this drop-off in coverage to be stunning, regardless of the cause or causes.
If people aren't hearing about the war regularly, the war simply fades away, no longer a cause for anxiety or political pain. Anyone who's watched the turn-out for anti-war events in DC drop precipitously in the last year can see the correlation with the vanishing media coverage.
Here's the story from the Times:
March 24, 2008
The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet.
Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The drop in 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.
Experts offer many other explanations for the declining media focus, like the danger and expense in covering Iraq, and shrinking newsroom budgets. In the last year, a flagging economy and the most competitive presidential campaign in memory have diverted attention and resources.
“Vietnam held the media’s attention a lot better because it was a war with a draft that touched a lot more people; people were sent against their will, and many more Americans were killed,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.
“In a conventional war, like World War II, there’s dramatic change, a moving front line, a compelling narrative,” he said. But after the triumphal first months, Iraq became a war of insurgents vs. counterinsurgents, harder to make sense of, “with more of the same grim news, day after day.”
The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.
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.
The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year’s Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.
The drop accelerated with a sharp decline in violence in Iraq that began at the end of last summer. The last six months have been safer for American troops than any comparable period since the war began, with about 33 killed each month, compared with about 91 a month over the previous year.
“The available news hole got so much smaller because election and economic news took up so much of the space,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center.
There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers’ archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend.
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”
He 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. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.”
Many news organizations have fewer people in Iraq than they once did, though no definitive numbers are available. Coalition officials have said that although there were several hundred reporters embedded with military units early in the war, the number has been measured in tens in recent months.
Violence against journalists makes reporting on Iraq costly and difficult; executives of The New York Times have said that the newspaper is spending more than $3 million a year to cover Iraq. The risks have forced news organizations to hire private security forces and Iraqi employees who can go places that Westerners cannot safely explore.
From the start of the war through 2005, journalists and their support workers were killed in Iraq at a rate of one every 12 days, according to tallies kept by the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2006 and 2007, the rate was one every eight days. Most of those killed have been Iraqis.
“Danger and the expense are gigantic factors,” Mr. Jones said. “The news media have to constantly revisit how much money and risk to expend.”
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Richard, I'm expecting a change in the quantity of reports coming out of Iraq over the next months. Many of Maliki's own forces have defected apparently. And while Maliki vow's to follow in the footsteps of his leader and king Bush, by refusing to talk, then it can only get worse, not better. This article tells a little:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi lawmakers will hold an emergency session on Friday in an attempt to end violence in the oil city of Basra after an army crackdown on Shi'ite militia sparked fighting across the south and mass protests in Baghdad.
Authorities have imposed a three-day curfew in the capital to contain the violence, in which more than 130 people have been killed since the government launched the offensive on Tuesday against fighters loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The assault on Iraq's second biggest city has exposed deep divisions between rival factions within Iraq's majority Shi'ite community. It is also a major test for U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's ability to prove Iraqi forces can stand on their own and allow U.S. forces to withdraw.
With violence spreading across the Shi'ite south and affecting the country's vital oil exports, lawmakers called an emergency session on Friday.
"Today (Thursday) we reviewed the situation in Basra. We agreed to hold an emergency session tomorrow to discuss the Basra situation and how to resolve it," parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashhadani told Reuters.
Mashhadani said representatives of Shi'ite and Sunni parties in parliament, including lawmakers loyal to Sadr, had agreed to attend the special session starting at 3 p.m. (8 a.m. EDT).
Sadr, who helped install Maliki in power after an election in 2005 but later broke with him, has called for talks with the government. But Maliki has vowed to battle what he calls criminal gangs in Basra "to the end".
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2423186320080328
Yikes - just an aside - I've been given a daily calendar for 2008 with complaints and shrieks written by the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The calendar is about apostrophes. *shriek* please replace in your mind vow's with vows! Thanks everyone.
To me, the death toll in this war conveys a misleading message. 4,000 dead is a relatively modest number, especially given our population and the casualty figures of previous wars.
Thanks to breakthroughs in battlefield medicine, more Americans are surviving - if horribly disfigured, and condemned to an existence that many of us would consider a fate worst than death. I've seen a few of these men and women on television - and my heart goes out to them. It's the number and quality of life of those seriously wounded and permanently maimed (which itself excludes those servicemen who will later come down with ailments like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) that conveys a more accurate picture of the human price of the Iraq adventure. The numbers of those seriously wounded and permanently maimed is at least triple that of those who died - and may well be exponentially higher.
I would argue that our rhetorical preoccupation with the death toll – 4,000 dead in a country of 300 million – might be one reason why Iraq has become an incidental issue in the Presidential campaign. We need to bring home the plight of the soldier who will never walk with his own legs, or go to the bathroom unaided, or who has been so horribly disfigured that many of us cannot bear to look at him for more than a few moments.
4000 would be 400 in Iraq, as they have 90% less population.
Their civilian death figures are staggering though - many people seem to ignore numbers unless they are affected personally (then the number ONE can seem too large) - remember the tsunami?
Kayakbiker did a story on the diminishing coverage of the war:
http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2008/03/a_body_falls_in.html#more
Matthew,
I agree about the survival rate being as bad as the death rate for our troops in Iraq (and Afghanistan for that matter). When I was at the IVAW house yesterday, Geoff Millard was telling someone about the new *improved* helmets the field guys are getting now. The surface is impenetrable as far as bullets go, but the force of said bullets causes the brain itself, inside the skull, to become terribly damaged. The brain floats in fluid, after all, but the fluid was never going to prevent traumatic brain injury during such brutal action.
So more soldiers survive, as you point out, but they are far more damaged.
One.
1.
How about the number one?
That's how many deaths are too many if you're a soldier who dies because public officials lied about the need for military action.
One is too many deaths if the one is your son or daughter or mother or father or friend....
The Washington Post just published several pages of photos of the most recent casualties. I look at each one of them, and think about what kinds of holes their deaths have ripped in the hearts of those who loved them, in the communities they grew in....
One death is too many.
Matthew - you are so right. There are far, far worse than the vets who return in coffins. When I need reminding, which I never do; or when I just want to examine the costs of war again (also a needless task); I take another look at globalvillage's video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdhkJS3UFaU
These are the images that will outrage more than a flag-draped coffin or even beautiful strong images of the dead. It's the living - or the not-really-living - that has the greatest impact. There are a couple on this video like those you mention, Matthew. They are men we would find it hard to hold eye contact with for any reasonable amount of time. How to keep the eyes from the swollen brain and missing eye, to concentrate on the living eye.
NMP I agree with you too, where is the outrage about Iraqi civilian deaths. And worse - those who've survived - barely. How are the injured doing in Iraq?
Karen, next time you are at the IVAW house, please say hello to the vets and say that they have support and admiration for their endeavours, from a lot of people here in Australia - especially me. Would you also please give Resistance a good friendly pat from Australia. Keep up the great work guys. I hope you will find some peace in your hearts soon.
Richard, 2 of my 3 brothers were called up for National Service during the Vietnam war. We were lucky - one brother got married - married men didn't have to go to Vietnam. When it was the younger one's turn and they were about to send them to Vietnam, he went AWOL awaiting the election landslide of the new Prime Minister who campaigned on ending our involvement in that war. It happened and he turned himself in immediately. The Vietnam Vets were all home within weeks.
1 ONE one loss or brain injured, or severely life-quality-reducing injured is TOO MANY.