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 Editorials | At Issue | October 2005 
At 2,000, Iraq's Military Deaths Got the Media's Full Attention
 Katharine Q. Seelye - NYTimes
| | A number like 2,000, artificial or not, may have prompted news organizations to revisit a story they had been neglecting. |
When the death toll of Americans in Iraq reached 1,000 back in September 2004, The Omaha World-Herald ran a respectful article in a single column down the right side of its front page. "A grisly milestone reached in Iraq," read the headline.
Last week, by contrast, when the roster of American dead reached 2,000, The World-Herald displayed that stark number in large type at the center of its front page, above an article and three photographs showing the war's human toll, including a bank of tombstones.
Other papers, too, that had dutifully acknowledged the first 1,000 dead seemed to give greater emotional weight to the loss of the second 1,000. Single columns gave way to feature layouts. Roll calls of names were supplemented with pictures, ages and hometowns. Elaborate graphics and maps charted the who, when, where and how. Writers wrestled with the why.
"Military toll tops 1,000," The Boston Globe's headline reported last time. For the second 1,000, the approach was more personal: "Grieving families find little peace."
Television - where a new survey found that coverage of the war has diminished - also seemed to give fuller expression last week to the 2,000 mark than it had to the 1,000.
How to explain the difference? Highlighting deaths during war can be perceived as a political statement, as Lincoln learned when he was accused of playing on people's emotions with the Gettysburg Address. Were editors last week trying to compensate for having ignored Iraq lately? Was it a reaction to the growing scale of casualties, though the numbers are still small by the standards of other wars? Or was it implicit criticism of the war itself?
"The whole mood of the country has changed," said Ted Koppel, the anchor of ABC's "Nightline." Mr. Koppel drew intense criticism in April 2004 - a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq - when he read the names of the 721 men and women killed since the start of the war in March 2003.
The Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country's largest owners of local television stations, refused to run the program on its ABC affiliates, saying it was antiwar propaganda that would undermine the American effort abroad.
Last week, Sinclair executives, through a representative, declined to comment on the 2,000th death or the widespread coverage it received.
At the 1,000 mark, many still saw the war as having a clear purpose and goal. Now polls show that a majority of Americans think it was wrong to invade Iraq in the first place and do not see a good way out.
The 2,000 mark also came as the war and other problems have left Mr. Bush at the nadir of his popularity. Editors and media specialists said these factors helped make the press a little more sure-footed as it paused last week to examine the war and its human costs.
"The Bush administration is going through a rough patch," said Dee Jack, the news editor at The World-Herald who oversees the front page. "I think things converged to make this journalistically and intellectually a weightier milestone" than the 1,000th death, she added. The World-Herald regularly endorses Republican candidates and endorsed Mr. Bush.
The 1,000th death came on Sept. 7, 2004, days after Mr. Bush was re-nominated at the Republican National Convention and just before the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
At the time, Mr. Bush did not mention the 1,000 mark. Senator John Kerry, his Democratic challenger, made only passing reference to it, issuing a statement noting the "tragic milestone," but not making it his main message of the day.
A majority of Americans still supported the war then, with 53 percent of those polled in a Pew Research Center study saying that the United States made the right decision in invading Iraq, and 39 percent saying it was wrong.
"Media coverage both shapes and reflects public opinion," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "The press coverage in the run-up to the war was very pro-war and the country was very pro-war."
Now, 44 percent say the United States made the right decision and 50 percent say it was wrong.
"Bush is in a less sound position than he was 1,000 bodies ago," said Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University.
At the 1,000 mark, Mr. Thompson said, the press was somewhat restrained. "A lot of journalists were very worried that if they were critical, they would be accused of something tantamount to treason, as 'Nightline' had been," he said.
That restraint may have been intensified because the 1,000th death came during an election season.
"The news media were walking on eggshells last fall not to appear to be joining the fray," said Ralph J. Begleiter, a journalism professor at the University of Delaware who successfully fought the Pentagon's decision not to release pictures of coffins returning from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base.
Others disagree that self-restraint was at work.
"It is not out of timidity that the press was less critical of the war last year," Mr. Koppel said. "It was, how are you going to prove that what the president and his advisers were saying was inaccurate? I believed there were weapons of mass destruction, and most people I know believed it at the time."
Mr. Bush himself spoke directly of the deaths last week. With the 2,000 number at hand, he spoke to a group of military wives in Washington, telling them that "each loss of life is heartbreaking," though he left no doubt that he would stay the course. "The best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops," he said, "is to complete the mission."
The New York Post put a quotation from the president's speech on its front page, which hailed "2,000 heroes."
James J. Carafano, a military expert and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, said that it would have been "dumb" for the White House to have ignored the occasion.
"Not to mark it," he said, "would make it seem they were ashamed of the sacrifice of the 2,000, which would not be the best P.R. stand to take."
Mr. Carafano said he saw the number as meaningless but said it reflected how journalists work. They do not cover policy issues regularly, he said, "and when an event comes along that allows them to illuminate a policy, they jump on it."
At the same time, the Pentagon tried to steer reporters away from making too much of the moment, with a military spokesman in Baghdad warning in advance that 2,000 "is not a milestone."
"It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives," the spokesman, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, said in an e-mail message to military reporters.
He said that the 2,000th death was just as important as the first. The true milestones of the war, he said, were when Americans volunteered for duty or Iraqis joined the coalition forces. "Celebrate the daily milestones," Colonel Boylan advised.
The media largely ignored his plea, instead offering extensive coverage that may have seemed out of proportion in part because overall coverage of Iraq appears to have diminished. The number of reporters embedded with military units has dwindled, the danger to reporters still in Iraq has escalated and television in particular has been paying less attention to the war.
During the last year, the three major networks devoted only about half the time to combat in Iraq that they did during the previous year and a half, according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which monitors network news.
From March 20, 2003, to Sept. 7, 2004, the networks devoted 2,342 minutes to combat coverage on their nightly newscasts, he said. (Combat coverage, which excluded reports on rebuilding and weapons of mass destruction, accounted for 57 percent of all Iraq stories, he said.)
But from Sept. 7, 2004, through Oct. 21, 2005, a few days shy of the 2,000th death, the networks ran 1,215 minutes of combat coverage.
The 1,000 mark came after 18 months of war, while the second came after a shorter stretch of time, 13 months, accounting for some of the difference. But Mr. Tyndall said he believed the early coverage was excessive, in part because the news media - and the country - were "gung-ho for the invasion."
In an odd way, the diminished coverage over the last year may help explain the bolder coverage for the 2,000th death. Analysts said that the media in general seemed to reduce its Iraq coverage in part because the continuing deaths produced a numbing sameness that made them less newsworthy.
A number like 2,000, artificial or not, may have prompted news organizations to revisit a story they had been neglecting.
In addition, the bad news from Iraq "fits the larger story about the administration, that they're in free-fall," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Things are going badly, and here comes yet another story that fits that larger narrative theme. If Bush's numbers were higher, I do believe that this number wouldn't be seen as having the same potential meaning." |
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