here’s why you didn’t know that

Last night, I linked to a Pew report released on May 25 which concluded that while the media’s number-one issue in the first quarter of this year was “Iraq,” the focus of most of the “Iraq” reports was the debate about the war— which took place here in the good old U.S. and A. I noted Americans’ narcissism, and suggested that the media simply feeds it: goes along to get along.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project that has just released a report about news coverage in the second quarter of this year, who is quoted in today’s NYT, appears to back up that finding.

“It’s a lot easier to cover [the war] as a political debate in Washington than to cover it on the ground in Iraq,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, which is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington.

While the amount of coverage of Iraq-related events declined in the second quarter in favor of campaign coverage (there lots of conflict there for all you infotainment fans), so-called “Iraq-related events” were still mostly about Americans.

The report notes:

Another finding in the first quarter was how much the war coverage focused on Americans rather than on Iraqis. Fully half of the coverage about events inside Iraq was about American combat and casualties as opposed to Iraqi casualties, Iraqi internal affairs, reconstruction efforts or other matters.

In the second quarter, the picture looks similar. News from inside Iraq became even more U.S. focused. Fully 55% of coverage about events on the ground dealt with U.S. combat and casualties, U.S. troop activities and soldiers charged with crimes. [e.a.]

So there’s no need to wonder why we don’t know more about how Iraqis feel about secularism or about nationalism (vs. the more popular narrative notion of endless sectarian conflict/civil war). The answer is simple: even when the media is reporting “about Iraq,” the reporting is all about us.

I daresay I was prescient about Americans’ focus exclusively on themselves even during the run-up to the Iraq war; see this post about my April 2003 conversation with the actor Ron Silver. I wrote:

I like to think that perhaps I had something to add to his understanding when I floated my insight—that American anti-war sentiment was not about Iraq. Anti-war sentiment as expressed primarily by our cohort was primarily a culture war issue: for them, it was about their own self-image. They were afraid that expressing war-like sentiments would make them look bad. (To whom? I wonder). They were American narcissists, self-involved, and most of them couldn’t give a shit about Iraq, about which they knew nothing (ignoring the fact that in our globalized world, the status of Iraq, among other Middle Eastern nations, is about America). They cared what their friends and peers thought about them. In America, it is always about peer pressure.

My thoughts and feelings haven’t changed about that. It’s more than a little disappointing, though, to see that, if anything, the narcissism is even more entrenched. Maybe that’s the best reason that America should never go to war: we are unprepared, in our own eyes, to be the bad guy.