On Veterans Day Nov. 11, we honor veterans and their past service. But how much did we really know about their sacrifice when it was being made? When the casualties were coming on the battlefield? A study of war coverage over the last century shows we knew very little, says Scott Althaus, a University of Illinois professor of political science and of communication, and director of the university's Cline Center for Democracy, whose research examines the dynamics of popular support for war. Althaus spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
Your study, published earlier this year, looked at a random sampling of The New York Times' war coverage from the two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the first three and a half years of the Iraq War. What did you find?
Our study was the first to compare news about military casualties across all of America's major wars from the past century. We found that American losses were at least mentioned in about one in 10 war-related news stories. But only about one in 50 of those stories gave substantial attention to the scale of losses. And those stories were rarely on the front page. Even less attention was given to enemy and civilian casualties. Readers back home looking for information about casualties had to dig deep to learn much about the human costs of war.
Why this study?
I'm an Army veteran, and when I served overseas during the Cold War, I noticed that people back home didn't seem to be too aware of the sacrifices our military was making for them. That was in peacetime, before 9/11 and two of the longest wars in American history. But despite these changes, the American public is no more engaged or informed than before. This study helps us understand why this disconnect can happen.
What most surprised you about the results?
I was surprised that the amount and presentation of casualty information didn't change much over the past 100 years, even though the nature and scale of contemporary wars is far different than the wars from the first half of the 20th century.
I also was surprised to find that much of the news about casualties was presented in ways that downplayed the human costs of war. American casualties were usually anonymous unless identified by name in "Names of the Dead" lists, and they often were presented as reasonable sacrifices, even during the Vietnam War.
But the biggest surprise was that attention to the wounded - those who made it home after these wars were over, and among the living veterans we honor on Veterans Day - had dropped off recently. In every war, more Americans are wounded than are killed. The war in Iraq claimed the lives of more than 4,800 Americans, and left over 32,000 wounded, but Times coverage of Iraq casualties mentioned the dead twice as much as the wounded. In previous wars, the paper gave about equal attention to both.
You only looked at The New York Times. Isn't it possible that other papers or news outlets - such as radio, television or theater newsreels - reported more on casualties?
The Times is just one newspaper, and newspapers are just one way that Americans have gotten their news about wars. It's reasonable to assume that other media could have reported casualties differently. So another group of co-authors and I checked this possibility out in a different set of studies that have yet to be published.
Looking at newsreel coverage from World War I to Vietnam and television news coverage from Vietnam to the invasion of Iraq, we found that visual news media gave even less attention to casualties than The New York Times. But newsreel stories were almost twice as likely to show casualties as television news reports, which means that - contrary to much conventional wisdom - wars shown to television news audiences were more sanitized than those shown to news audiences in the pre-television era.
Did the level of government censorship in each conflict make any difference?
If you mean the sort of censorship in which military officers decide which news items from combat areas can be shown to home front audiences, the answer is no. The two world wars and most of Korea were under a heavy censorship blanket, while news reports coming out of Vietnam and Iraq were not filtered at all by military forces. Yet there was about the same amount of casualty coverage in the uncensored wars as in the censored ones, and little difference across wars in the ways that casualties were covered.
This means that self-censorship by journalists and their news organizations is probably a more important factor than military censorship in explaining why Americans get relatively little news coverage about the human costs of war that have been borne by our living veterans, and by those who never came back.