Whither the Media?

THE STATISTICS SEEM grue- some enough. Nearly 150,000 Iranian and 60,000 Iraqi soldiers killed. Billions of dollars spent on the war effort each month. Iranian children as young as nine or 10 slaughtered in suicide assaults on Iraqi minefields. And the stakes seem high enough. Sixty percent of the West's oil flows from the Gulf. An Iranian victory might unleash a wave of radical Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region, threatening the stability of moderate Arab states.

So why does Dan Rather mention the Iran-Iraq war almost parenthetically as the evening's fourth story--preceded by a Tab commercial--and only as a 20 second blurb? And why don't we find the horror stories of the battlefield massacres on the front page of The New York Times? Why is the story a short column on page A23, between a story on a municipal garbage strike and an ad for cheap shots?

Halfway around the globe, the largest armies since World War II have inflicted enormous upon each other. The Iranians have amussed estimated 400,000 troops in a front covering Basra. Iraq's second largest city, and the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway. Already, three times as many Iranian soldiers have died in the 43 month conflict that did Americans in the much longer Vietnam War.

Public ignorance of the scale (and sometimes of the existence) of the conflict testifies to the tremendous power of the mass media in determining the importance and relevance of news items. A tornado in Kansas or flood in South Carolina attracts reporters from everywhere; every exasperating item of the disaster is detailed, every reaction of the survivors chronicled, every political angle scrutinized.

But news directors apparently have a different approach to those distant catastrophies in weird-sounding places. The standing commandment for this amorphous category is "just tell me the main stuff and don't bother with the particulars."

Network camaras briefly aimed their lenses at the Iran-Iraq war last month when the U.S. charged that Iraq had used mustard gas against Iranian soldiers. Iran had sent 15 of its wounded to West European hospitals, hoping to prove an Iraql violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention banning mustard gas. Toxicologists in Belgium found strong evidence of a mustard gas attack, and the U.S. State Department joined other nations in condemning Iraq.

But the battlefield deployment of chemical weapons inflicted "only" an estimated 1100 Iranian casualties, a minute percentage of the hundreds of thousands of casualties suffered by both sides. Why wasn't the war the major topic of international discussion in February when tens of thousands of Iranians died in "preliminary forays" into Iraqi defense lines?

For its part, the press argues that the Iranian and Iraqi ban on foreign reporters precludes coverage of the war. A disturbing implication arises from this position: If you can't get neat, satellite-transmitted color videos ready for the seven o'clock news, it's not worth covering. Surely, censorship and restricted information flows cannot and must not deter correspondents from reporting the news. They may not be able to tell us the details of the conflict, but at least reporters can inform us of the gravity of the issue.

In a more insidious defense, some would suggest that the war's irrelevance to the average American justifies the limited coverage. However, most people attach relevance to particular new items only if a Network tells them it's important: if a piece of news is not the top story on the evening news, it must not be terribly important. A poll of "informed" Americans would probably find last month's most important story involved the Libyan in London. The networks and major papers kept the story on the front burner of political discussion for nearly a week. But is the Libyan incident as relevant to the average American as the furious war in the Mideast, which may affect the economic, political and military security of the nation? Apparently the movers and shakers of the press thought so. While the commentators were endlessly debating whether the Libyans would permit a search of their embassy, hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis were engaged in their spring offensive.

This is not to suggest that the Libyan embassy incident was unimportant. The story won the competition for coverage with a variety of interesting events. But how and why the press chooses its stories, and consequently how people view those events, leaves much to be desired. Network competition for ratings and newspaper circulation drives may be undermining the most important goal of journalism--to objectively report world events of import rather than to cater to the demands of a sensationalism-hungry audience.