Ombud: Is Iraq Slowly Moving Off Front Pages?

By: E&P Staff His newspaper gets hit from both sides, Timothy J. McNulty, public editor for the Chicago Tribune, relates in his most recent column. Some think the paper plays up "negative" stories about Iraq on page one, others feel the paper doesn't cover the war often enough.

Rather than ponder the usual partisan biases, McNulty took the rare step of actually counting how many stories about Iraq have been hitting the front page, at his paper and others.

"I thought we should examine some actual data about how many Iraq stories appear on the front page of this and other major American newspapers," McNulty wrote on Sunday. "What is immediately clear: a definite drop in the number of front-page articles as the war and occupation progressed during the last three years." It made him wonder about "Iraq fatigue."

In the first five months of this year, the Tribune placed Iraq on the front page 41 times in 151 days. But in the same period last year, there were 74 Iraq articles on Page 1, and 138 stories in 2004.

The war started in 2003 and, if anything, violence and civilian deaths have increased since 2004. Each years has seen particularly oft-covered stories: from Abu Ghraib to elections to Haditha.

A Tribune reseacher found that this trend held true at other major papers, too.

"The Washington Post led all U.S. papers with 132 front-page articles on Iraq in the first five months of this year," McNulty announced. "Still, this year's number was down from the 161 articles on the front page in the same period of 2005. The Post ran twice as many stories in early 2004 as it has in 2006.

"At the other end of the spectrum of front-page coverage, USA Today, the nation's largest circulation newspaper, had 21 Page 1 articles on Iraq in the first five months of this year, 22 the year before and 42 the year before that."

More stats: The New York Times 113 (2006), 143 (2005) and 216 (2004). The Los Angeles Times, for the same years: 127, 155 and 238. The Boston Globe: 32, 65 and 143.