Sly goes to Washington Post

Liz Sly will leave her job as Baghdad correspondent for the Los Angeles Times to become Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post. She replaces Leila Fadel, who heads to Egypt for the Post. fishbowlDC

NPR: It's getting tougher to cover Iraq

The Iraqi government is rousting journalists from their lodgings and denying them access to sensitive stories, NPR reports. The government recently started asserting more control over the media, first by forcing them to sign a pledge not to incite sectarian tensions and then by keeping them away from areas where there's fighting or terrorist attacks on the notion that the journalists won't be safe.

Of course, access is as vital as ever as Iraq works to form a federal government and as U.S. forces withdraw.

As NPR reports:

Nearly 200 journalists, most of them Iraqis, have died in Iraq since the American invasion, and scores more have been kidnapped, beaten, jailed, sued and fined for doing their jobs.

"Combat" isn't a policy position

The Associated Press has cautioned reporters against reporting uncritically on the Obama administration's declaration that "combat operations" in Iraq are over. Poynter

Shifting priorities, shifting beats

As the U.S. military shifts its emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, the New York Times and other papers are moving reporters from Baghdad to Kabul.

Alissa Rubin will be leaving her post as Baghdad bureau chief for the Times to cover the fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stephen Lee Meyers will take Rubin's place in Baghdad.

From the New York Observer:

Back in April, foreign editor Susan Chira told us the Times would be bulking up its Pakistan coverage.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira then. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up ... But we won’t leave Baghdad."

She also told us that many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including CJ Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, would be turning their attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well.

Iraq, uncovered

The Project for Excellence in Journalism did a study back in May that found coverage of the Iraq war accounted for only three percent of what American newspapers and broadcasters produced in the first months of 2008.

Now the New York Times reports that the major networks have "quietly" decided to stop sending full-time reporters to Iraq. From the story:

In Baghdad, ABC, CBS and NBC still maintain skeleton bureaus in heavily fortified compounds. Correspondents rotate in and out when stories warrant, and with producers and Iraqi employees remaining in Baghdad, the networks can still react to breaking news. But employees who are familiar with the staffing pressures of the networks say the bureaus are a shadow of what they used to be. Some of the offices have only one Western staff member.

The staff cuts appear to be the latest evidence of budget pressures at the networks. And those pressures are not unique to television: many newspapers and magazines have also curtailed their presence in Baghdad. As a consequence, the war is gradually fading from television screens, newspapers and, some worry, the consciousness of the American public.

As network and cable news outlets cut back in one war zone, there has been no corresponding increase in coverage of our other war zone - the one that's supposed to be the real frontline in the war on terror. Until CNN recently sent a full-time reporter to Afghanistan, no major television or cable news outlet had a full-time bureau there.

(via Romensko)

Back to Iraq

Dexter Filkins returns to Iraq.

War and the news

The Iraq war is now the third longest war in American history. War coverage, however, has dropped precipitously in the last year, accounting for only 3-percent of what American newspapers and broadcasters produce, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

(For a more dramatic look, check out this graph.)

Find out some of the reasons why on today's excellent "To The Point", produced by Dan Konecky. The guests are CBS foreign correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who suffered severe injuries in a car bomb attack while reporting from Iraq; Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism; Sherry Ricchiardi, senior contributing writer at American Journalism Review (here's her piece on the subject), and Abderrahim Foukara, Washington bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic News.

My contribution to the show is the 10-minute segment at the end about monkeys guiding prosthetic arms with their brains.

Maybe if they wore suits of iron and could fly...*

As John Harris at Politico parses the reasons why the media went apeshit over Hillary Clinton's reference to the assassination of RFK, David Carr at the New York Times laments the sharp drop in coverage of the war in Iraq:

Television network news coverage in particular has gone off a cliff. Citing numbers provided by a consultant, Andrew Tyndall, the Associated Press reported that in the months after September when Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress about the surge, collective coverage dropped to four minutes a week from 30 minutes a week at the height of coverage, in September 2007.

When you're hunting for ratings or hits, you're going to go with what attracts eyeballs. War just isn't as popular as it used to be.

*Some other things to think about this Memorial Day:

Fourth vet dies from PTSD drug cocktail.

Profiles of California's dead.

What's a human life worth anyway?

The politics of warriors.

In case you lost track

The number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq is 3,996.