Media victory in Iraq

Sociologist Andrew M. Lindner writes in the latest issue of the American Sociological Association’s Context magazine about his findings on how the media reported, and continue to report, the Iraq war. He says, the dearth of embedded reporting effectively gave an Iraq “media victory” for the Bush Administration,

“The embedded program proved to be a Pentagon victory because it kept reporters focused on the horrors facing the troops, not the horrors of the civilian war experience,” said Lindner, who is completing his doctoral dissertation at Penn State University. “The end result: a communications victory for an administration that hoped to build support for the war by depicting it as a successful mission with limited cost. link

The results are based upon analysis of 742 news articles written by 156 English-language print reporters in Iraq during the first six weeks of the war. Lindner’s full original article appears here.