Iraq vs. Afghanistan: Which war gets more U.S. news coverage?

Posted By Michael Wilkerson Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 3:21 PM Share

In an FP piece Monday, Morton Abramowitz argued that the U.S. media have been too soft in covering the shift in policy toward the war in Afghanistan, and that the war in general has received too little scrutiny. 

The article made me wonder if there had been an increase in coverage of Afghanistan since the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, given his professed focus not to lose there and his changes in policy.

Fortunately, the Pew Research Center's Project on Excellence in Journalism [PEJ] keeps weekly tallies of which topics are covered in the U.S. media, or as they call it, the "newshole." In one interesting graph, they show how much less coverage of Iraq there is now than two years ago.

At my request, the wonderful people at PEJ provided their raw data on how much coverage Iraq and Afghanistan were getting as a percentage of the "newshole" over the last year. Using my extraordinarily rudimentary Excel chart skills, I decided to examine if much had changed since President Obama was inaugurated and started implementing changes in policy.

The short answer is: not a lot. Although there are occasional spikes, the total coverage of Afghanistan jumps over 5 percent only once, in July, corresponding with a major offensive in Helmand under the newly appointed command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And the average is low. From January through July, Afghanistan received an average of 1.92 percent of coverage, while Iraq got 2.01 percent.

That Afghanistan and Iraq are now nearly equal in coverage is a change. From June-December 2008, Iraq averaged 3.26 percent and Afghanistan 1.17 precent. Still, with the amount of U.S. taxpayer money going into both places, and the amount of reconstruction funds wasted, one has to wonder about the low percentage devoted to both wars. The sad part is, even if average media consumers were more interested, which they are not, only a few huge media outlets could afford to cover the wars constantly, and most of them are already losing money anyway.

A bigger version of the chart is viewable here.

Michael Wilkerson is a researcher at FP. This item has been cross-posted on Passport and the AfPak Channel blog.

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, AFPAK CHANNEL, IRAQ, MEDIA
 

KSCHRIER

5:01 AM ET

August 14, 2009

Since January, my most

Since January, my most time-consuming responsibility at work has been reading and analyzing Western news coverage on Iraq (and sometimes Afghanistan), so its really interesting to see the raw data. I'm curious though, what news sources are counted? How is it counted when multiple news outlets run the same synicated piece, or even slightly-altered pieces on the same topic? What I mean is, attacks in Iraq still get a wide amount of coverage. AP will quickly publish a piece that will appear in all the major newspapers and eventually trickle down to smaller outlets. For the next day or so, various outlets will rehash the same event. So maybe a lot of U.S. outlets still cover Iraq, but the range of topics is not there.

I definitely wonder about the low coverage of both wars considering all the effort and funds that the U.S. is devoting to them. Do you think it would help to run more positive or analytic stories about Iraq, to pique the typical U.S. news reader's interest? There is certainly not a lack of news. Iraqi and pan-Arab news is bursting with stories of investment, diplomatic missions, economic development, and all sorts of human interest stories. There's more to Iraq than bombings!

And, there is definitely more going on than foreigners trying to get their Iraqi pet sent home, I wish Western news would try to steer away from those stories.

 

JWING

1:02 PM ET

August 14, 2009

Once debate ended in U.S. - so did media coverage

The American media followers what the government is doing/saying in Washington. When Iraq no longer became an issue with Congress and the president, then the coverage took a huge drop. Now Iraq hardly ever breaks the top 10 news stories in the U.S. In March 2009 was the first time Iraq did not make the top ten for an entire month. In June 2009 Iraq did not even break the top ten in any of the major news outlets (newspapers, radio, TV, internet).
See: http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2009/07/iraq-completely-disappears-from.html

 

MARIK7

4:27 PM ET

August 14, 2009

I'm not sure I'd agree that

I'm not sure I'd agree that reconstruction funds were ''wasted.'' More likely, they went to exactly the corporations that they were intended to go to.

That's not waste.

Unless you are writing from some other viewpoint than that of the corporations who benefitted.

 

NYGDAN

11:43 AM ET

August 17, 2009

Nice work putting it together

Nice work putting it together for this article. But I noticed that there are no error bars, or indication of error. With 1.92 and 2.01 you've got a difference in covereage of only 0.09. So if I understand correctly thats a difference in 'newshole coverage' of nine-thousandth of a percent. Can the 'newshole' method really claim that much precision? Just from looking at their methods that you linked to makes it seem like they can't get anywhere near that.

 

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