ABSTRACT
The two wars waged by the United States in Iraq since 1990 provide an excellent opportunity to understand the rapidly changing global news media environment. The first war, in 1991, was a kind of coming-out party for the Cable News Network (CNN), which had emerged in the previous decade as a dominant force in the growing market for twenty-four-hour news coverage. Many viewers recall the urgent eyewitness reports filed by CNN anchor Bernard Shaw from a Baghdad hotel room as U.S. forces began bombing the city. When the United States invaded Iraq again in 2003, however, CNN’s coverage had changed dramatically. Viewers who tuned into CNN often saw images of the Baghdad night sky provided not by CNN’s own cameras, but by a relative newcomer to the media world: Al Jazeera, the Qatarbased Arab satellite news channel, which had many of its own journalists on the ground in Iraq at a time when U.S. outlets were reluctant to do so.
