Michael O'Hanlon, Media Analyst

I tend not to go in for all the Michael O'Hanlon-bashing (it's gotten so excessive and disproportionate to the man's actual influence that it's bordering on dull), but I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this, in a piece on the media's diminishing interest in Iraq:

There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers’ archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend.

“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”

I love that his way of tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage isn't by actually tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage. It's by measuring how many interviews he does in a day.

Also, it's great that a meta-piece on the media's coverage of Iraq happens to display the same flaw that pervades the coverage itself. There are other Iraq analysts.