Media coverage on war dwindles

About two a day for five years.

Two mothers, two fathers, two siblings two friends; two soldiers whose trips home from Iraq are marked only by a plastic body bag adorned with a folded American flag as a memory of their service.

Each day since the beginning of the war in Iraq, an average of two families have gotten bad news about someone they care about at war.

That’s the news. The bad news.



So even if you open the paper and see no coverage of the ongoing war, because nothing “newsworthy” happened the previous day, know that at least two people are getting news today. And tomorrow. And the next day.

In five years, more than 4000 families have gotten news, of a very personal sort. In that time, beginning with largely sensationalized news coverage of the first bombings in Baghdad, little by little, the mainstream media’s coverage of the war has dwindled.

We’ve gone from 24-hour, first person coverage to only occasional stories about death toll milestones or major events. It’s clear Americans, and their news organizations, have grown accustomed to the war.



Frankly, there just isn’t much conventional news coverage about the war anymore. There are features, and occasional reports. But where Iraq used to dominate front pages when it was new and fresh, our top papers have to resorted coverage consisting of a couple inches buried on an inside page.

Wars desensitize people over time. While still troubling, the gruesome, bloody photos of the carnage overseas that used to invoke tears or even nausea, shown early on by the media, have become so commonplace, that many people say the images and their stories have lost their newsworthy element.

Maybe it’s not that what’s going on is any less newsworthy, but that we have just come to accept that it’s happening, and feel we no longer need the constant daily reminder. It all comes down to the point of reporting news and reading news.

The question then, from a media standpoint, is whether or not the war, droning on each day in an overwhelmingly unchanging fashion, is in and of itself, enough to be called newsworthy. Or, now-a-days, does something more need to happen to warrant valuable page space.

After all, Interstate-10 is packed with cars every morning, but “Freeways clogged again,” doesn’t make for a very interesting front-page headline, now does it?

The answer, it seems, based on the recent performance of the news media, is that Americans know the war is going on now, so news occurs only when something changes. We’ve come to accept the war as the status quo; it’s no longer news.

We accept that two people die a day, so now it’s only news when an explosion kills fifty of more. But what of the two? Why are there deaths not newsworthy?



It’s because we accept that two more will die tomorrow. Don’t forget, the unavoidable side effect of acceptance is complacency. And with complacency comes inaction.

We say “war” but what we mean is “two bodies a day.” When we stop hearing about two bodies a day, we think of war like we think of traffic on Interstate-10, a necessary evil.

That’s not a place this country wants to be.

War, unlike traffic, is not supposed to happen each day. Therefore, for everyday there is a war, news is being made. Let’s not, as a culture or as a news media, deny that two deaths a day is not normal, but is most definitely newsworthy, and should remain in the front of our minds for each day it occurs.

The nature of the news we read about in magazines and newspapers, see on CNN and hear about during presidential debates has changed greatly since 2003.



But tomorrow, two more families will get news in the same way two families did on the first day of the war. To them, tomorrow’s news is by far, the biggest of the entire war, if not their entire lives.

And worst of all, it may not even hit