Iraq too dangerous, expensive
for TV nets to cover
Nick Juliano
Published: Monday December 29, 2008
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Iraq_too_dangerous_expensive_for_TV_1229.html
The war in Iraq, nearly into its sixth year, has become too
expensive and remains too dangerous for US television networks to
justify maintaining full-time correspondents in the war zone.
ABC, NBC and CBS have dramatically curtailed their presence in
Iraq, where 130,000 US troops remain, and the networks are shifting
their attention to Afghanistan, the New York Times' Brian
Stelter reports Monday.
Waning attention from the public and the lack of compelling
images from a war zone where violence has significantly decreased
are partly responsible for the networks' decisions, Stelter
reports. Furthermore, although fewer US troops are dying in Iraq it
remains perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for
journalists, and networks are having a tougher time justifying the
large security details Iraq correspondents require.
Television networks are not alone in their waning interest in the
protracted Iraq war. As Seth Mnookin notes in Vanity Fair, many newspapers and
magazines, including the San Francisco Chronicle,
Boston Globe, and Time have curtailed or
eliminated their Baghdad bureaus, as well. Among US media outlets,
according to Mnookin, the New York Times is virtually
alone in maintaining nearly as many reporters in Iraq as when the
war began.
The 24-hour cable networks Fox News and CNN each still have a
single full-time correspondent in Iraq, and the wire services along
with the Washington Post maintain their own multi-reporter
bureaus.
The decrease in reporters has corresponded with a decrease in
coverage. Evening newscasts spent 423 minutes on Iraq this year
compared to 1,888 minutes in 2007, Andrew Tyndall, a television
news consultant, told the Times.
The changing coverage situation is in part a reaction to the
changing situation on the ground in Iraq. Instead of dramatic daily
gun battles between US troops and insurgents, much of the daily
developments involve local political squabbles.
Gawker's Alex Pareen says that the waning
coverage may not be the worse possible outcome.
Not that it's all that bad. The best work a full-time TV
correspondent can do in a war zone is cut through government
propaganda and expose how shitty the situation is (most wars are
shitty). That job was finished about three years ago (two years too
late, but still), forcing a change of strategy and hopefully
slightly hastening the eventual withdrawal of most of our combat
troops there. Now, of course, the networks could go ahead and waste
cash on war correspondents, but why bother when nothing they file
will end up in the nightly news? Unless a shoe is thrown at the
president, obv. But sectarian politicking and turf battles do not
good television make. The medium itself is ill-suited to
intelligently covering whatever the hell the Iraq situation is.
A former CNN bureau chief, Jane Arraf, told Stelter that an
editor bemoaned the "same old pictures of soldiers kicking down
doors" earlier in the war, when troops were hunting for al Qaeda
sympathizers and insurgents.
"You can imagine how much more tedious it would be to watch
soldiers running meetings on irrigation," she quipped.