Beyond Two Percent

Aside from the recent shoe-tossing incident when Bush visited Iraq, there's hardly any coverage of Iraq anymore, as Megan Garber points out in the Columbia Journalism Review. "Per studies from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the war regularly wins less than two percent of the weekly U.S. news hole," she writes. "And complacency shouldn't keep us from being fairly shocked when, after Iraq's cabinet approved a 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq -- suggesting a measure of resolution to the 'timetable' debate that had been raging in Washington for years, not to mention a de facto end to the war -- the agreement was all but ignored in the media." The problem, she says, is "partially logistical: on-the-ground reporting from the country is both exceptionally expensive ... and incredibly dangerous (Iraq, for the sixth year in a row, has been named the deadliest country in the world for journalists)." As a result, however, the "story of Iraq is, if not fading altogether from our collective consciousness, then at least fading generally from our collective conscience."