Why Iraq vanished from the U.S. news

“Whatever happened to Iraq,” an analysis in the American Journalism Review, examines what it calls a “dramatic dropoff” in media coverage of the Iraq war.

Among the main reasons cited in the piece: the enormous danger for journalists on the ground in Iraq; war fatigue; efforts to “sanitize” the war by the Bush administration; plunging newsroom budgets and shrinking news space; competing megastories on the home front like the presidential primaries and the sagging economy figure into the equation, and the exorbitant cost of keeping correspondents in Baghdad.