U.S. media staying put in Baghdad
By Peter Johnson
USA Today
When the fighting stopped after the Gulf War in 1991, U.S. media made a fast retreat home.
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Though NBC, CBS and ABC aired 2,200 stories during the two-month war on their evening newscasts, within six months, that number had dwindled to 48 a month.
Postwar reconstruction is just beginning in Iraq. While news organizations have famously short attention spans, they say they'll stay.
And after an initial flurry of reports from Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, when the United States attacked terrorist attacks there, the media once again backed off. The 300 pieces that aired on the evening newscasts in each of the first two months of that campaign dwindled to 28 by May 2002, according to statistics compiled by network news analyst Andrew Tyndall.
Now that President Bush has declared the liberation of Iraq, will reporters once again make a hasty retreat and return to business as usual?
Tyndall and many news executives predict that won't happen. Although most media organizations — major newspapers, TV networks and magazines — have vastly reduced the number of staffers in the war region, they say that in-depth coverage in Iraq, and in the Middle East as a whole, will continue for the foreseeable future.
"This is going to have news legs for a long time," says Marcy McGinnis, CBS News hard-news chief. "How it all shakes down will be pretty interesting."
"The big difference is we still have so many soldiers over there, and the reconstruction of Iraq is a much bigger task than the rebuilding of Kuwait was in 1991," adds Time managing editor Jim Kelley.
But there's more to it, he says. "Sept. 11 made people realize we live in a world that is not just bounded by these borders, and it helps to know more and understand what other people around the world are thinking. That appetite has grown."
Tyndall agrees. "The Islamic world is now the central focus of all international coverage," he says, and the Bush administration "is going to oblige the media to cover it by engaging the Islamic world."
ABC "World News Tonight" chief Paul Slavin says, "Woe to the news organization that tries to move too fast away from this story."
He points out that new technology and partnerships between media here and abroad make it possible for U.S. news organizations to stay on top of foreign coverage at a fraction of what it cost a decade ago.
Today's challenge is not about getting the story, "it's how do you make it interesting? This is a hugely complex story," Slavin says.
But it's one that "has gotten in the American consciousness and is going to stay there for a while," says NBC News president Neal Shapiro. NBC has opened a Baghdad bureau for it and MSNBC, and Shapiro expects many stories from the region in the months to come.
To that end, NBC last week announced that it had hired Richard Engel, the 29-year-old free-lance who reported for ABC News from Baghdad throughout the war. He'll be based there.
"Rebuilding a country is a fascinating story," Shapiro says. "It has all sorts of aspects: political, economic, religious — and the best of U.S. intentions."
