Rebecca Dana and Lizzie Rattner have written an article in the New York Observer about the media and Iraq. Some of the highlights….

While Vietnam is remembered as the television war, Iraq has been the television-crawl war: a scrolling feed of bad-news bits, pushed to the margins by Brad and Jen, Robert Blake, Jacko and two and a half years of other anesthetizing fare. Americans could go days on end without engaging with the war, on TV or in print.

“There’s a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news,” said veteran war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, “at a time when, in my view, it couldn’t be more serious.”
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Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting. At CNN, reporters need clearance from the bureau chief to leave the network compound; similar rules apply at other networks.

The danger “really impedes our ability to get around the country to talk to average Iraqis, to get a really good sense of what’s going on on a daily basis,” said Paul Slavin, a senior vice president for ABC.

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“The problem is that people aren’t publishing the work,” said Stefan Zaklin of the European Pressphoto agency. Mr. Zaklin recalled taking a picture of a fallen U.S. Army captain during the November 2004 assault on Falluja. The soldiers, he said, “were O.K. with me taking that picture,” and it ran in Paris Match, the Bangkok Post, and on page 1 of Germany’s Bild-Zeitung, Europe’s highest-circulation newspaper. Its only exposure in the U.S., he said, was a two-hour spin on MSNBC.

“The U.S. press is even worse in terms of not publishing the complete story,” Mr. Zaklin said, “and I think it’s because of the perceived taste or tolerance levels of their audience.”
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“I don’t think the networks have been able to create a narrative or mythology for the war,” said Ron Simon, the television curator for the Museum of Television and Radio. “For a narrative, you have to have an answer to Norman Mailer’s famous question, ‘Why are we here?’ Two years later, they’re still struggling to ask that question.”

Without that overarching narrative, news organizations are left to report inconclusive results under dangerous and unhelpful conditions. “I have to say, from where I sit—and this is from being on the ground—it’s really hard to do much more than figure out what the narrative over the past 24 hours was,” said New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, on the phone from the paper’s Baghdad bureau.
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In 2003, after the invasion, media companies were warned not to feed the American news consumer too much material on the downside of war. The media-consulting firm Frank Magid Associates advised broadcast outlets that its survey results suggested that viewers had very little appetite for stories about casualties, prisoners of war and anti-war protests.

“There’s this kind of general, industry-wide view that Americans don’t like anything tough, don’t like anything complicated, don’t give a shit, don’t know how to spell the country much less care what’s going on there,” Ms. Amanpour said. “I find that a very patronizing attitude.”
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Reporters are still working the war zone, if not in the same waves as during the initial invasion. The broadcast networks and CNN are spending millions of dollars on Iraq newsgathering operations each year, and executives from the networks said that the financial commitment hasn’t dropped off.

“These are now fixed costs,” said Chris Cramer, the managing director of CNN International, who oversees Iraq coverage for the network. “They’re the price of doing business there, if you want to run a meaningful operation. We’re now spending several millions of dollars in security alone, and that’s before we get to staffing costs and accommodations.”