Where’s Iraq? Buried underneath all the worry over oil prices

Zimbabwe’s elections received more press coverage than the Iraq war during the week of June 23-29. In fact, according a recent Pew Research Center publication, the 2008 campaign, oil prices, the economy, the Supreme Court handgun ruling, and North Korea dominated top news stories for the week, while the Iraq war didn’t even appear as a blip in the week’s main news coverage. That means that the Iraq war made up for less than two percent, the lowest number documented in the survey, of news stories across the country for that week.

According to the Pew survey, public interest in oil prices continues to grow with the rise of oil prices. Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed say they follow the news about oil prices very closely; in November of 2007, that number was 44 percent.

However, that same logic doesn’t follow the Iraq war casualties. In March, a Pew survey found that only 28 percent of adults were able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans had died in the war. The media hasn’t been much better at covering the war or providing decent analysis, according to a December 2007 study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Nearly 97 percent of the stories were U.S. centric, the study notes, ignoring the overall effect of the war on Iraqi civilians. What’s more, despite the fact that 2007 was the deadliest year so far for U.S. forces in Iraq, the amount of Iraq coverage declined.

During June of this year, Iraq virtually disappeared from the news, despite the war’s connection to oil prices and the "no bid" contracts awarded to multinational corporations that would give major oil companies 75 percent of the value of the contracts and their Iraqi oil partners only 25 percent.

And the violence continues in Iraq, on par with when the war first began. In June, 29 Americans died while fighting in Iraq, bringing the total number of American deaths to 4,114 so far, according to icasualties.org. Sixty-three soldiers were wounded in action last week alone. And according to Iraqbodycount.org,  there have been anywhere from 85,778 to 93,575 Iraqi civilian deaths since the war began in 2003.