Narrating the Endgame

by Robert M. Entman

It probably makes sense for the media to drastically reduce their coverage of wars like the recent conflict in Iraq once victory is declared. But whereas news organizations know, or think they know, how to cover wars, the rules for and goals of post-war coverage appear quite murky. During the war, they know (or think they know) what constitutes a major battle and what a minor skirmish, which authorities to interview and which to ignore, what pictures to run and what to discard. Post-war, they don’t seem to have internal guidelines on what events constitute important progress toward the achievement of America’s goals for the occupation/liberation/democratization of--and its ultimate departure from--Iraq.

Admittedly the Bush administration has failed to articulate objectives, measures, and timetables very clearly, so the media alone are not responsible for this situation. We know from Lance Bennett’s studies and many others that media coverage takes its cue from elite discourse, and neither the administration nor the so-called opposition party is generating a sensible one about the post-war situation.

But news organizations do not seem to even be attempting to organize the information about daily events into a coherent “scorecard,” and that leaves audiences and citizens in a state of perplexity. It’s as if the much-despised (by academics) game schema were being deployed randomly: today we’ll tell you about the third inning of today’s Cubs game, tomorrow about the Stanley Cup, and the next day we’ll report the sixth inning of the Cubs game from the day before yesterday. Even the well-covered failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been treated haphazardly, with seemingly definitive conclusions publicized one day and ignored the next--scientists apparently agree those two mobile labs could not in fact have been used to manufacture such weapons, nor was any trace of chemical residue found, yet President Bush and other officials continue to cite them as WMD evidence. But beyond this, the accumulation of incidents, of ambushes here and demonstrations there and assassinations elsewhere, just keep piling up with little narrative shape, no assessment of implications for achieving American objectives and going home.

Again, this is not the media’s fault, exactly, because the occupation of Iraq is unprecedented in American history, and our leaders are apparently about as clueless as the rest of us as to what it all means or what the U.S. should be doing. But the foregoing analysis also applies to post-war Afghanistan, so chaotic media coverage of the endgame may be an emerging trend rather than a specific product of the circumstances in Iraq.

If we are truly in a new epoch where the U.S. will be throwing its weight around the world at will, one thing we academic analysts might do is contribute some suggestions as to how to narrate the aftermath. The first suggestion might be to devote, say, 25 percent of the energy, money, graphic razzle-dazzle and reportorial derring-do expended depicting and celebrating the (apparent) military victory to uncovering and clearly narrating progress and setbacks on the uncertain march through the endgame.

Robert M. Entman is Professor of Communication at North Carolina State University. His most recent book, Projections of Power, will be available from the University of Chicago Press in early 2004.

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