research review

National Importance or Public Interest?

By Jeannie Ryder

In her article “Whatever Happened to Iraq? How the media lost interest in a long-running war with no end in sight” published in the American Journalism Review, June 2008, Sherry Ricchiardi not only explores the recent precipitous decline of media coverage of the Iraq war but also some reasons why this came to be.

She offers impressive comparative numbers between the years of 2007 and 2008 in order to document the dramatic dwindling of war stories in all forms of media during this time frame. Ricchiardi uses these data as a backdrop to her overarching concern: What should drive news coverage of an ongoing story: national importance or public interest?

Ricchiardi’s examination of the waning coverage of the Iraqi war included conversations with editors, journalists, news producers and referenced several media-based organizational studies. Many cite economic reasons, such as the cost of maintaining             personnel overseas, for the decline. For some media outlets it was becoming increasingly harder to justify maintaining overseas correspondents in Iraq while there were domestic “megastories,” such as the presidential campaign, to cover. Not that the Iraqi war was any less important, as most of Ricchiardi’s sources noted. It just was not “the” story any longer.

The other viewpoint that emerged in her conversations with journalists was to insist that when there is a story of such national importance as the Iraq war the media have an obligation to continue to cover it despite any lack of interest. Several journalists, such as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, argued that there are plenty of different aspects to any given news story that can be explored to keep a story both fresh and in the public’s eye.