CNN, not al Jazeera. More than that, if they strive to avoid civilian casualties, that suggests that they are a military organization, or operating as one. After all, it is militaries that target one another's personnel while trying to avoid civilian casualties. Creating such a perception of themselves would simultaneously identify this group as the equivalent of the U.S. military, and therefore legitimate—which is to say, not terrorist. This is the central message of the tapes, the ultimate reason for wanting them seen by an American audience: we are not terrorists, we are just another military force. This is particularly important in context, since, according to the story, the group is reaching out at this time in part because they want to engage the United States in negotiations. But the United States, which might negotiate with an insurgent or militia group, would not negotiate with terrorists.
That still leaves them as a threat to American forces. To be sure, virtually every night the number of U.S. casualties has been mentioned on the nightly news, reported on cable every day, and in the papers every morning—on print and online. During those periods when the amount of Iraq coverage dipped, which happened on a regular basis long before the success of the "surge,"[1] the one thing the networks always felt obligated to mention was U.S. casualties. That is often all that is reported—the number of troops killed, perhaps where they died, and sometimes the weapon that killed them. As a typical example, on April 17, 2005, Dan Harris on ABC reported that, "Insurgents in Iraq this weekend killed three US soldiers and also an American humanitarian worker. … The three soldiers were killed and seven others wounded when mortars hit a marine base near Ramadi. Witnesses say insurgents also tried to infiltrate that camp."[2] (A story on the aid worker, identified by name, followed immediately.)[3]
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- ↑ For the year 2007, for example, the Tyndall Report, which monitors the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) notes that:
The War in Iraq was Story of the Year by a wide margin. The networks monitored the progress of Commander in Chief George Bush's troop build-up—the so-called surge—in Iraq and the simultaneous debate on Capitol Hill about bringing troops home. That storyline effectively ended in September when Gen David Petraeus testified to Congress that violence in Iraq was moderating and the President ordered the extra troops home. Before that testimony, the Iraq War averaged 30 minutes of coverage each week; in the year's final 15 weeks the average was a scant four minutes. Non-war coverage of Iraq continues its steady decline.
Notice, however, that those totals combine coverage of the war itself with the debate in Washington. Tyndall calculates that actual combat coverage over the course of the year was only 61 percent of the total. See tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2007/. The networks' ability to report much more than casualty reports is now deeply compromised, as their regular bureau operations have all but shut down. See Brian Stelter, "TV News Winds Down Operations On Iraq War," New York Times, December 28, 2008, nytimes.com, available from www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/business/media/29bureaus.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink. The press outlets constantly repeat the refrain that the American people are tired of the war and will not sit for continued war news, but produce no evidence in support of the claim. What is clear is that they have little interest in continuing to foot the growing bill for covering the war, when reduced violence reduces the number of easy-to-cover-stories, in the sense that they can be produced via a well-worn, time honored template, rinse, lather, repeat, but instead require some degree of creativity. By 2 weeks before the 2008 election, coverage of Iraq had plummeted to a mere 1 percent of all stories, across not only broadcast TV, but also cable, newspapers, radio, and online news sources. See Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, PEJ News Coverage Index, October 6–12, 2008, available from journalism.org, www.journalism.org/node/13204.
- ↑ Dan Harris, "News Headlines," ABC World News Tonight Sunday, April 17, 2005, available from Lexis-Nexis Academic, www.lexisnexis.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T5381421803&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=376&resultsUrlKey=29_T5381421806&cisb=22_T5381421805&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=8277&docNo=400.
- ↑ In fairness, the press is often limited by the information provided by the military, which is intentionally kept to the bare minimum to deny the enemy what could be its only means of battle damage assessment. While the desire to keep critical information out of enemy hands is certainly understandable, in a war where information is itself so often a key battleground, the military needs to reevaluate how this is done. In earlier conflicts there were no opportunity costs—nothing to balance against the benefit of withholding information. Today there is. The benefits of releasing information on casualties may not be enough to outweigh the risks, but the calculation needs to be made, and it may be the case that more information ought to be released earlier, or that mechanisms to release information without doing harm can be explored. I discuss these trade-offs at greater length in Cori E. Dauber, "Winning the Battle But Losing the War: the Relationship Between the Media Coverage of Iraq and Public Support," May, 2005, Chapel Hill, NC, unpublished ms.
