U.S. Military Fatalities in Iraq: A Perspective on Year 5

President Bush's surge strategy intends to use the might of the U.S. military to establish secure conditions in Iraq under which the promise of political progress will be realized. The U.S. military used this approach in the past when the U.S. Fallujah Offensive of late 2004 established security for the Iraqi Election Cycle in 2005. But the promise of political progress for insurgents was not fulfilled in 2006 upon formation of the Maliki government, and they resorted to extreme levels of violence in response, killing 1,080 U.S. troops during the 12 months ending September 2007, more than in any other comparable period. In the second half of Year 5, from September 2007 through the fifth anniversary of the war on March 19, 2008, U.S. forces in cooperation with Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias helped improve security conditions once again. But unless the surge's promise of political progress is fulfilled, the patience of the insurgents and militias is likely to dissipate and violence will increase once again in Year 6.     

Bargaining,Fear, and Denial: Explaining Violence Against Civilians in Iraq 2004–2007

From mid-2004 to mid-2007, the Iraq war was distinguished from other comparable insurgencies by its high rates of civilian victimization. This has been attributed to a number of different factors, including the role of Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as the regional ambitions of Iran and Syria. Using an unpublished dataset of violence in Iraq from 2003–2008 from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), this paper argues that the violence against civilians is best understood as a combination of three interacting logics—bargaining, fear, and denial—that are predominantly local in character. First, armed Iraqi actors bargained through violence both across and within sectarian communities, and were driven by mechanisms of outbidding and outflanking to escalate their attacks on civilians. Second, the pervasive fear about the future of the Iraqi state encouraged the “localization” of violence in Iraq, particularly in the emergence of a security dilemma and the proliferation of criminal and tribal actors. Finally, Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq played the spoiler in Iraq, using mass-casualty attacks to generate fear among the population and deny U.S. efforts to build a functioning state. Only by addressing each of these three logics as part of its counter-insurgency strategy can the U.S. put an end to violence against civilians and develop the Iraqi state into a credible competitor for the loyalties of the population.     

The American Way of Going to War: Mexico (1846) to Iraq (2003)

Prior to the Iraq War, there had been a long series of American wars in which U.S. leaders often maneuvered the other side into “firing the first shot.” This strategy of “passive defense” amounts to an American way of going to war, and it dates back at least to the U.S.-Mexican War. The United States thus retained the moral and legal legitimacy, an asset which is especially important in a democratic political system. The Iraq War represents a fundamental departure from this American way. It might be the worst crisis since Vietnam. but that war was just another entry in the U.S. playbook for how to go to war. The Iraq War not only contradicts longstanding practices in American foreign policy, but it has the potential to issue in far greater international disorder than the Vietnam War. This catastrophe may make future presidents more heedful of John Quincy Adams’ prophetic words: go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.     

The elite press,the global system,and foreign news attention

This article presents summary findings from a content analysis of the foreign news coverage of four U.S. elite newspapers. Overall, the pattern of foreign news attention in the elite American press tends to reflect the “relative distances” between the United States and other national news targets. The more proximate another society is to the United States along economic, political, and cultural dimensions, the more likely the U.S. press will perceive its activities to be newsworthy. The country‐by‐country distribution of foreign news largely corresponds to existing hierarchical divisions within the international system. The reported foreign news is concentrated among the economically‐advanced, politically‐prominent, and culturally‐western societies; that is, the pattern of foreign news coverage is western‐oriented, big‐power dominated, and Eurocentric.     

Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse

This article examines the way in which the news media frame public policy issues and the extent to which other political players (e.g., interest groups, politicians) influence this issue framing process. Our analysis focuses on the issue of gun control, comparing the rhetoric generated by interest groups and public officials on the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban with actual network news coverage of this legislation from 1988 to 1996. Results indicate that both sets of political players employed several interpretative issue frames and worked hard to put their preferred themes on the agenda. However, at times, the media intervened in the framing process, especially as the debate matured. Specifically, the news media (a) structured the overall tone of the gun control debate, (b) adopted a distribution of framing perspectives different from that of politicians and interest groups, and (c) packaged policy discourse more often than not in terms of the "culture of violence" theme. These findings point toward previously ignored media effects and attest to the potential role the media play in shaping public policy debates.     

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency

Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to “high-intensity” or “conventional” combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency’? In many ways, the ongoing reorientation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resistance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence - and the eventual fall-out from the troubled Iraq campaign - the ongoing learning of counterinsurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military.     

Circling the Wagons: Soft News and Isolationism in American Public Opinion

This study investigates the differences in coverage of foreign policy by the soft and hard news media, and the implications of such differences for public attitudes regarding the appropriate U.S. role in the world. I find that, relative to traditional news outlets, the soft news media place greater emphasis on dramatic, human-interest themes and episodic frames and less emphasis on knowledgeable information sources or thematic frames, while also having a greater propensity to emphasize the potential for bad outcomes. I then develop a conceptual framework in order to determine the implications of these differences. I argue that the style of coverage of soft news outlets tends to induce suspicion and distrust of a proactive or internationalist approach to U.S. foreign policy, particularly among the least politically attentive segments of the public. I test this and several related hypotheses through multiple statistical investigations into the effects of soft news coverage on attitudes toward isolationism in general, and U.S. policy regarding the Bosnian Civil War in particular. I find that among the least politically attentive members of the public, but not their more-attentive counterparts, soft news exposure—but not exposure to traditional news sources—is indeed associated with greater isolationism in general, and opposition to a proactive U.S. policy toward Bosnia in particular.     

Media Ownership and News Coverage of International Conflict

How do differences in ownership of media enterprises shape news coverage of international conflict? We examine this relationship using a new dataset of 591,532 articles on US-led multinational military operations in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, published by 2,505 newspapers in 116 countries. We find that ownership chains exert a homogenizing effect on the content of newspapers’ coverage of foreign policy, resulting in coverage across co-owned papers that is more similar in scope (what they cover), focus (how much “hard” relative to “soft” news they offer), and diversity (the breadth of topics they include in their coverage of a given issue) relative to coverage across papers that are not co-owned. However, we also find that competitive market pressures can mitigate these homogenizing effects, and incentivize co-owned outlets to differentiate their coverage. Restrictions on press freedom have the opposite impact, increasing the similarity of coverage within ownership chains.     

Greasing the squeaky wheel: News media coverage and us development aid, 1977–1992

This study explores the role that news media coverage plays in influencing US foreign policy in general, and foreign aid policy in particular. It is expected that foreign policy officials will be responsive to the content of the domestic news media and will attempt to align their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of a particular issue. In this study, it is hypothesized that that higher levels of news coverage of a potential recipient country will lead to higher aid commitments. The analysis examines the levels of US aid commitments to those it provided aid during the period 1977–1992. Even with an admittedly simple measure of news media coverage, the empirical findings are clear. The level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in the levels of aid offered by the US. Thus a domestic political motive may be considered to be operative along with more widely studied determinants of aid based upon humanitarian motives and national self‐interests.     

Media and the institutional perspective: U.S. and Canadian coverage of terrorism

Abstract

This paper reports data from a content analysis of television news coverage of terrorism. A proposed typology of terrorism and media coverage is tested with stories from network news in the United States and Canada. The typology posits that media coverage of terrorism depends on the act's relation to institutional power bases. The two types of terrorism outlined either seek out or avoid media coverage, depending on whether they challenge or reinforce institutional power. Because of media's interrelationship with the economic and political institutions, coverage of terrorism will take on the flavor of these institutions’ perspective. The data show that although media cover terrorist acts that are linked to U.S. institutional interests, the tone of such coverage casts uncritical perspective. The implications for the general message system of news, with particular regard to the media's contribution to international understanding, are explored.     

How Much Is Too Much? Media Attention and Popular Support for an Insurgent Party

It is commonly observed that parties and candidates tend to receive coverage in the news media and attention in proportion to their electoral support. Although this norm serves to ensure that coverage is balanced or fair, news values often produce a different pattern of coverage in the television news media. This article considers the dynamic relationship between coverage in the news media and popular support for an insurgent party - the Reform party - in the 1993 Canadian election campaign. The analysis shows that coverage of Reform in the news media underwent an important change during the campaign that appears to have occurred before any change in popular support. While this change in attention to Reform was critical for Reform's ability to mobilize its potential electoral support, it also provides empirical support for the argument that there is an underlying equilibrium between the amount of coverage a party receives and its political support. Data for this analysis come from a campaign wave survey of vote intentions as part of the 1993 Canadian Election Study and a television content analysis of campaign news. The analysis applies an error-correction approach, which assumes an underlying equilibrium relationship, to model media access and vote intentions. The article thus expands the current applications of the error-correction technique while offering substantively important evidence of the political impacts of media decisions for the electoral support of new parties.     

Going Public as Political Strategy: The Bush Administration,an Echoing Press,and Passage of the Patriot Act

Research suggests that political elites excel at controlling political and media information environments, particularly in times of national crisis, such as the events and aftermath of September 11. This study examines the creation and passage of the Patriot Act, which was proposed by the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks and quickly passed with strong support by the U.S. Congress. We argue that (a) the public communications of the Bush administration, particularly those by George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, and (b) news coverage about the legislation were instrumental in this outcome. Public communications by Bush and Ashcroft and news coverage about the Act were content analyzed to identify the timing of the messages and the themes and perspectives emphasized, and congressional debates and activities were examined for insight into their relation with administration and press discourse. Findings suggest that Bush and Ashcroft's communications, in combination with a press that largely echoed the administration's messages, created an environment in which Congress faced significant pressure to pass the legislation with remarkable speed.     

Business as Usual

In the years since 9/11, there is no doubt that the emphasis of U.S. global strategy has been on counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq. During this period of time, the U.S. investment in strategic, political and military resources in the Middle East, Iraq, and the war on terror, which are the top priorities on the list of Bush＇s foreign policy, has been far greater than in any other fields. However, there are some in the U.S. who believe that China＇s rise has been much ignored by the U.S., due to the global war on terror （GWOT）, and that America should, in fact, be focusing more on China, not the Middle East. However, as we see it, China has by no means been ignored by the U.S., neither has China＇s rise been the result of U.S. ignorance.     

An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

This article examines whether the outbreak of an insurgency after the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an avoidable policy failure or whether the structural conditions surrounding the occupation made such an outbreak inevitable. Several U.S. policy mistakes, in particular the deployment of too few troops, a lack of comprehensive political and military planning for the occupation, disbanding the Iraqi military, the failure to establish a government in waiting, and overly aggressive de-Baathification, greatly exacerbated rather than ameliorated the various structural problems. More fundamentally, structure and policy choices interacted at all levels to explain the Iraq failure. The unavoidable conditions that coalition forces encountered in Iraq—a divided society devastated by years of war, sanctions, and misrule—and the political context in the United States made the challenge for successful policy execution difficult. This structure constrained and delimited the options open to U.S. policy makers but, even within those narrow limits, the United States made many bad choices that further diminished the chances of success.

A particularly important series of policy mistakes occurred well in advance of the buildup to war itself. The orientation of the U.S. armed forces away from counterinsurgency, the failure to establish a political settlement before invasion, and other controllable policy choices in the prewar period all led to enormous difficulties during the occupation itself. Thus, by the time of the invasion, these policy choices had become almost like structural constraints and the failures had a snowballing effect, making policy corrections far more difficult.     

TV News and the language of acid rain in Canadian‐American relations

This study focuses on American television news coverage of a specific issue, acid rain, in Canadian‐American affairs. It attempts to bring into focus the interaction of the formal characteristics of the news and political orientations of the viewing audience to offer an alternative approach to the pluralistic models that dominate media and foreign policy research. Finally, the study offers several strategic propositions describing the relationship of news language to political responses for this particular case of Canadian‐American affairs.     

Print journalism as political communication: The Iran hostage crisis 1

Studies of political communication and persuasion typically focus on deliberately persuasive communications of political actors. Contemporary rhetorical theories suggest the importance of rhetorical examinations of a range of communications not normally considered rhetorical/persuasive, including media news reports. Bormann's fantasy‐theme analysis is a rhetorical‐critical method that allows critics to discover the rhetorically created social realities of groups of people through detailed examination of their communication behavior. The method is particularly suited to discovering the motives of social actors who share social realities or “rhetorical visions.” Applied to U.S. print media coverage of the Iran hostage crisis, fantasy‐theme analysis reveals the motives that urged journalists to give the episode massive coverage, that urged Americans to become preoccupied with the episode, and that urged Americans to vote out an incumbent president. Thus, the study reveals the tremendous persuasive impact of “objective” materials like news coverage on electoral politics.     

Embedded journalism – more than a conflictreporting issue

Abstract

One of the outstanding features of the recent war in Iraq was the prominent media coverage given to so-called embedded journalists, that is, reporters travelling with, and under, the protection of coalition forces. This practice was severely criticised for compromising the independence of journalists. Editors nevertheless defended it on practical grounds. In this article it is argued that embedded journalism is part and parcel of the way South African media operate, albeit in a somewhat different form from what is prevalent in Iraq and that it includes far more than issues relating to conflict reporting. The issue of conflict of interests while gathering news is well documented and routinely addressed in handbooks on media ethics as well as ethical codes. But the South African media usually tend to shun open discussion of this and other ethical issues. Whatever the reason, the lack of debate on these and other media ethical issues prevents media users from seeing journalism for what it is: a value-laden activity more often than not determined by commercial considerations. These issues are addressed within the South African context and some pertinent questions are posed on the political and commercial embeddedness of journalists, that is, how conflict of interest permeates South African media. It is concluded that owners, managers and individual journalists all have some responsibility for the embeddedness of South African journalists. Given the focus on profits, it is suggested that the way forward would be for journalists to start speaking out and applying their specific ethical codes.     

奥巴马治下美国“大中东”政策前瞻

奥巴马治下的美国对外政策的重点仍将是“大中东”。从伊拉克撤军,与伊拉克在政治、经济和安全关系协议方面作出规划,以解决美国在伊拉克长期利益和军事存在;可能与伊拉克进行谈判．但难度很大;中东和平进程有可能取得进展;阿富汗和巴基斯坦将成为美国的反恐重点地区;中国因素会受到越来越多的关注。     

Prime time hostages: A case study of coverage during captivity

Media coverage of the hijacking and diversion of to Beirut of TWA Flight 847 on 14 June 1985 by members of the Shi'ite Muslim Islamic Jihad was characterized by several unique aspects. For the first time during reporting of such an event, the hostages, their captors, and Middle Eastern political leaders were interviewed live on American television. The media were drawn directly into the negotiations to free the hostages when the hijackers and Amal mediators delivered a letter from the captives to President Reagan via the crew of reporters at Beirut Airport. The hijackers’ awareness of the importance of news coverage was indicated by their continuing use of the media to communicate their political views and demands to government officials and the public. This paper traces the efforts of the hijackers to make use of the media and details the coverage of the event by the three major U.S. networks and other major news organizations from the beginning of the crisis until the release of the hostages on 30 June.     

The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?

The conventional wisdom about local TV news is that quality journalism does not sell and that only by focusing on crime, disasters, and other “soft news” can newscasts get good ratings. Political scientists have decried the poor quality of TV news as a betrayal of the press's mandate to inform citizens of the important policy issues of the day so that they can hold government officials accountable. This study tests the proposition that audiences prefer low effort, tabloid journalism by looking at external measures of commercial success—the Nielsen ratings data. Utilizing data from a 5‐year study matching the content quality of 33,911 local news stories from 154 TV stations in 50 TV markets nationwide to corresponding ratings success, we show that solid reporting and a focus on significant issues actually produce better ratings than slapdash or superficial tabloid journalism. Additionally, we find that strategy-oriented coverage of political campaigns that focuses on the horserace does not build an audience. These surprising results have practical implications for democratic practice and local TV news production.