Western Journalists in Iraq Stage Pullback of Their Own

But privately, U.S. military officials acknowledge that they are not eager to showcase American military-led combat operations at a time when the Iraqi government is calling for a more limited role for U.S. troops and pushing for firm withdrawal timelines.

"It's very clear that they are trying to push us away from active areas of combat and trying to push us to places" where reconstruction and training are underway, said Associated Press bureau chief Robert H. Reid. "It's very difficult to pick an embed unit and be relatively assured you will see active combat."

American newspapers, which have contracted sharply in recent years as readership and advertising revenue have declined, have published fewer Iraq stories this year, and placed a smaller percentage of them on their front pages, than during any other period of the war in Iraq.

The number of front-page stories with Iraq datelines published by the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which continue to maintain large Baghdad bureaus, has dropped each year since the war began. The three dailies published 858 front-page stories with Iraq datelines in 2003, 379 last year and just 138 during the first nine months of 2008.

"When you have other things going on in the world -- a financial crisis, elections and Afghanistan, which is now becoming a more serious conflict -- it's harder to get on the air," said National Public Radio's Baghdad bureau chief, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who has been covering Iraq on and off since 2002. "The bar is higher."

The Los Angeles Times' Baghdad bureau chief, Tina Susman, took on that role in early 2007 as the increase in U.S. troops was getting underway amid endemic violence. The paper recently downsized its bureau from three to two foreign correspondents.

"During my first 12 months here, it was unusual to get to bed before 4 and even 5 a.m. because the story was so huge and because of the likelihood that it was headed for A1," she said. "That really has changed in the past few months. . . . That's dispiriting. How do media bosses, especially the American ones, justify not maintaining a presence in a country where there are 145,000 U.S. forces and where 4,100 have died?"

The Washington Post has sent more than 70 reporters, photographers and columnists to Iraq since the start of the war. The invasion was covered by more than a dozen journalists from the newspaper. In recent years, the size of the bureau has fluctuated, but the paper has assigned two or three journalists to the war on a permanent basis and brought in many more for temporary assignments. The newspaper's expenses for war coverage exceed $1 million a year.

Last year, Iraq was by far the dominant story on the evening television news, according to Andrew Tyndall, a network news analyst who tracks coverage on his Web site. But in recent months, Baghdad-based network reporters have gone weeks at a time without getting Iraq pieces on the evening news.

The three networks aired 130 stories with Iraq datelines on the evening news between September 2007 and September 2008, compared with 242 during the previous 12 months, according to a search on Tyndall's online database.

"Everyone realizes it's an important story," said ABC correspondent Miguel Marquez, who has covered Iraq since 2005. "But it's been six years of this. . . . The situation has become more nuanced. The U.S. doesn't seem to have its hand in everything anymore."

CNN and Fox News have kept large staffs in Baghdad. But they're being asked to do fewer live reports, broadcast journalists say. CNN now routinely keeps just one crew in the bureau, when just a few months ago two or three was the norm.

Western news organizations will soon grapple with an additional challenge. Many of their Iraqi employees -- who are often better suited for certain reporting assignments than Western journalists -- will soon be eligible to move to the United States under a new refugee program. Since the program was announced this summer, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has received several dozen applications.

"I don't know what's going on in America this year," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker who said he receives far fewer interview requests from Western journalists. "Maybe it's because of the election. I think they are less interested."

Staff researcher Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.