Invasion News Fits on Front Page More When an Enemy Does the Invading
The New York Times front page for April 5, 2022, featured four stories on the Ukraine War, including three at the top of the page.
The New York Times’ slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has appeared on the paper’s front page since 1897. But a comparison of Times coverage of the 2022 Ukraine War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows that the same kinds of news don’t always fit on the front page.
FAIR examined front pages of the New York Times between April 1 and April 30, 2022, and compared them to those from May 1 to May 31, 2003. The dates represent the second full calendar months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US invasion of Iraq, respectively—major armed conflicts involving major world powers illegally invading smaller countries.
In April 2022, there were a total of 179 stories on the Times‘ front page, and 79 (44%) concerned the Ukraine invasion. All but three were located at the top of the page (i.e., with no articles above them), where editors put the stories they consider to be the most important of the day. Fully 75% of all top-of-the-page stories were about the Ukraine war. Not a single day went by without a Ukraine story being published on the top of the page, and on 14 different days only stories about Ukraine were published on the top of the front page.
In May 2003, when there were 226 stories on the front page, only 41 of them (18%) reported on the Iraq invasion. Thirty-two of those were at the top of the page, with nine below; 25% of all top-of-the-page stories were dedicated to the Iraq War.
This means that a major conflict launched by the country where the paper is published was given less than half as many front-page articles—and a third of the top of the front page, where highest-priority stories are placed—compared to a war in which that country was not directly involved. Six days out of the month, the paper did not feature a single Iraq story at the top of the page, and the top-of-the-page stories were never exclusively about Iraq.
The apparently greater newsworthiness of military aggression when committed by an official enemy isn’t just on display on the Times front page. A study of the ABC,CBS and NBC nightly news shows (Tyndall Report, 4/7/22) found that the first full month of the Ukraine War got more coverage (3/22, 562 minutes) than the peak month of coverage of the Iraq War (4/03, 455 minutes).
Civilian deaths newsworthy or not
In May 2003, the Iraq War was just one of many stories to the New York Times (5/10/03)—and was sometimes pushed off the front page altogether.
Of the 79 front-page New York Times stories on the war in Ukraine in May 2022, 14 of them were primarily about civilian deaths as a result of the Russian invasion, all of which appeared at the top of the page. As FAIR has argued in the past (e.g., 3/18/22), coverage of the civilian toll of war is well-warranted, as civilians usually face the worst impact of modern warfare. By the beginning of May, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (5/2/22) estimated that there were at least 3,153 civilian deaths in Ukraine.
In contrast, during the month of Iraq coverage, there was only one story (5/1/03) about civilian deaths at the hands of the US military on the front page, a report describing an event in which US soldiers killed two protesters (described as part of “a crowd of angry Iraqis [who] chanted and threw stones”). The lack of coverage, however, did not reflect a lack of civilian casualties during this period: Iraq Body Count estimated that at least 7,984 civilian deaths had occurred by the end of May 2003.
Other stories about Iraqi noncombatants being killed in the war sometimes made the paper (e.g, 5/11/03), but not on the front page. The Times has a history of downplaying civilian casualties at the hands of the US military (FAIR.org, 9/18/15). The contrast between intense interest in civilians killed by Russia and minimal attention to civilians killed by the United States matches a previous FAIR study (3/18/22). It found 27 mentions on the nightly network news shows in the first week of the Ukraine invasion identifying Russia as responsible for harming civilians, as compared to nine mentions in the first week of the Iraq invasion that reported on the US harming civilians—fewer than the 12 mentions that depicted the US helping Iraqi civilians.
It should be noted that in 2007, the New York Times (7/18/06) announced it was decreasing its physical page size as a result of budget cuts. While Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, estimated that the change would only result in a 5% reduction of news, because pages were added, the front page suffered greater losses as a result of the smaller format; comparing May of 2003 to April of 2022, there were 20% fewer stories overall. But the Ukraine War still managed to get more reports on the front page than the Iraq War in absolute numbers, as well as making up a greater percentage of front-page stories.
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