They somewhat get it
The news agencies are finally noticing the lack of their own coverage of the Iraq War. However, they still don’t seem to understand the gravity of it.
In this AFP news article, the author blames the economy and the current presidential campaign as being the reason that the number of news stories about the Iraq War have dropped. I personally find this hard to believe. If the war was going poorly, there would be hundreds of news articles written (especially about the death toll reaching 4,000) which the Democrats would latch on to and parade around. This isn’t the case because, on a whole, the war is proceeding much better than it has.
The current economy and presidential election situations haven’t overshadowed the Iraq War in the news; the Iraq War has instead shrunk to an unimportant size. It is along these same lines that the articles states the following that I tend to agree with:
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 US 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, told AFP.
That not need be the case. I am personally interested in hearing positive news from Iraq it’s just they (the news) won’t oblige.
