Iraq War's Media Coverage

Iraq War's Media Coverage

This paper presents a critical analysis of an article that was published in Vanity Fair's October's issue in the year 2007. The title of the article is “Billions over Baghdad”. This article is written by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

American news media coverage of the Iraq War largely followed the same trends found by scholars who were examining coverage of prior conflicts involving the United States since at least the Vietnam War. Consistent with prior research, before and early in the war, antiwar protesters were more likely to be framed negatively than were pro-war demonstrators.

According to (Barlett, Steele, 2007) during the war's initial phase, from March 19, 2003, when the United States bombing began, to the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square on April 9, press coverage tended to be episodic, casualty free, and pro-American, especially on Fox News Channel (FNC). For example, studies have shown that American broadcast news channels aired more than five times as many shots of firefights and battles as images of casualties (and less than 4% showed dead soldiers or civilians), as did newspaper photographs from the first week of the war.

This period of uncritical, sanitized, and rallying press coverage reached its apex with the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, an image repeated an average of once every 4.4 minutes on FNC during that afternoon and once every 7.5 minutes on Cable News Network (CNN). This coverage fed a premature “victory” frame that not only correlated with Bush administration goals but had the effect of dramatically reducing the war's prominence on the news agenda (Barlett, Steele, 2007).

Yet, as became increasingly apparent in the summer and, especially, fall of 2003, the war was far from over. As the insurgency phase took off, media coverage slowly became more negative, more driven by events than administration frames, and less episodic. Still, some important story lines still adopted uncritical frames, notably coverage of the first insurgency period invasion of Fallujah by American forces in the fall of 2003, which greatly underplayed civilian casualties, and coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which avoided the use of the word torture in favor of less challenging labels such as abuse. These studies also point to the ways in which coverage of the war supported theories of news indexing and cascade activation by showing how the Bush administration dominated the framing of the war for some time and at key moments (Barlett, Steele, 2007).

As the war dragged on, however, events on the ground made it more difficult for the administration's frame to go uncontested. From the beginning of the war, the authors of the article have strongly criticized the press for over-reporting negative stories from Iraq. These charges increased in tenor as the insurgency grew and U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians died in increasing numbers. Studies analyzing reporting from Iraq in 2005 and 2006, however, came to a different conclusion. While it is true that press coverage ...