The Project for Excellence in Journalism has published a telling chart that measures the steady decline in media coverage of the Iraq War since the start of 2007. One culprit: the presidential sweepstakes. “In the last quarter of 2007,” write Tricia Sartor and Mark Jurkowitz, “coverage of the war diminished as coverage of another major event — the 2008 presidential campaign — picked up dramatically. Those trends continued and expanded this year. In February 2008, coverage of the war in Iraq dropped to 3 percent, the lowest total for any one month since the News Coverage Index began in January 2007. Coverage of the war rebounded slightly from March 1 through March 20 of this year, when it accounted for 5 percent of the newshole. One catalyst for that increase in coverage was the fifth anniversary of the war, which generated an examination of both the conflict and the fact that it seemed to have largely disappeared from the news media’s radar screen.”

Must-read: Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed in Iraq, published a great column summarizing a few of the questions the media have steadfastly failed to ask about the war.

Excerpt:

A frank assessment of the overall media performance, from the “run-up” to the “surge,” was nearly non-existent… What about the removal of the vast majority of U.S. reporters from Iraq in the early days of the occupation, just when they were most needed to warn of the daily Coalition blunders and emerging insurgency? The media’s role in falling victim to official propaganda in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cases? The delay in exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib — and attacks on civilians in Haditha and numerous other places?

“The list goes on: Why did it take years to really focus on ill treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans back here at home? To expose the rising suicide rates among soldiers in Iraq and returning vets? To assess the full trillion-dollar financial costs of the war, now a hot topic but underplayed for so long?… Why didn’t the media fight harder the Pentagon’s ban on showing coffins returning from Iraq? Why, for the most part, did they refuse to show dead or injured American soldiers from the war zone, thus preventing the public from absorbing the true human costs of the conflict?”