comments (Fall 2009)

 Comments

W riting in World Affairs last year, George Packer noted that, on the home front, the Iraq War was “an abstraction that routinely shades into caricature” and that “the image of Iraq is flickering and formless.” The indictment here was largely, and justifiably in my view, directed at press coverage of the war. I recall a discussion in 2006 with an Army officer, who charged that the media were purposefully discounting the good news from Iraq. We argued the point, my impression being that, rather than bad news, a typical day relayed hardly any news at all. The number of minutes the networks devoted each month to the war at its height amounted to roughly half of what it was in Vietnam. And, by 2008, that number had declined to a tenth of what it was in 2003. At one point in 2006, the number of embedded journalists had dwindled to fewer than a dozen—this, from more than 600 in 2003 . . .
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