ABSTRACT
At the time of this writing, the ongoing war in Afghanistan is entering its fourteenth year. This war’s unprecedented length makes it a particularly interesting case for scholars studying media coverage of war. In addition to providing tremendous variation in conduct, costs, and outcomes, it sheds unique light on how wars are fought, as well as sold to citizens – both at home and in allied nations – in our more partisan twenty-first century political environment. That partisan environment encompasses not only a shift in partisan control of government, but also increasingly has applied to the channels through which the public learns about such wars. In this chapter, we examine the actions of the press and political elites with respect to the Afghanistan war in order to assess the competing strategic narratives used by different political actors to describe and justify the conflict. Specifically, we examine (1) the relative prevalence in the media of narratives supportive of and in conflict with the Bush and Obama administrations’ narratives regarding the war, (2) whether more partisan news outlets systematically differed from more traditional outlets in their patterns of coverage, and (3) how party rhetoric and news coverage regarding the war shifted with the change in presidential administrations in 2009. To answer these questions, we rely on data tracking civilian and military casualties in Afghanistan and other objective measures of the conflict’s progress and cost, as well as original content analyses of presidential, congressional, and media narratives regarding the war and news coverage of that rhetoric by various news outlets, including CBS Evening News, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
