Iraq War, Media Coverage of

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. Furthermore, 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.

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 insurgencyperiod 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.

[Page 352]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, Bush administration officials and pro-war commentators often criticized the press for overreporting 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 focused quite a bit on “bad news” such as casualties, sectarian violence, and general political and social instability, when compared with real-world data on, for example, casualties and insurgent/terrorist attacks, the press actually underplayed these stories.

Another important feature of the reporting from Iraq involved the controversial “embed” program. Since the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Pentagon had employed a media management strategy of “precensorship” in which the military kept the press from the front lines and/or utilized a pool system in which a few journalists were allowed to cover selected actions on behalf of the press corps. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the desire to wage a more effective information war against an enemy whom they knew would charge coalition forces with atrocities, the military decided to change this policy and offer to “embed” reporters from around the globe (including Al Jazeera) with front-line units. Before the war, skeptics assumed these embedded reporters would develop some variant of the Stockholm Syndrome and churn out flattering and decontextualized coverage. Studies comparing embedded reporting to that of nonembedded, or “unilateral,” reporters showed mixed confirmation of these fears. They did, however, find that unilateral reporters were far more likely to show casualties. Embedded reporting was more favorable to military personnel and employed more episodic frames. After the Saddam statue fell and coalition forces entered Baghdad in force, large numbers of reporters disembedded themselves, with the number of embeds dropping from 700 to 23, and despite fluctuations during major offensives (e.g., Fallujah in the fall of 2003), that number remained in the mid-20s in 2005. Ultimately, then, the story of the embed program is a mixed one that evolved over the course of the war from episodic and uncritical to more thematic and negative. This, of course, mirrors the broader story of Iraq War coverage from invasion to civil war.

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