From WNYKRZK in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Is the surge working? President Bush wants to withhold judgment to the fall, but critics in both parties have seen enough and are pressing the White House for answers now. And at the center of the debate, there are numbers, always numbers.

U.S. troops continue to die, 29 so far this month, as the sectarian violence their policing continues.

We cannot sustain 160,000 troops indefinitely.

He asked for 20-something thousand troops, and I said, if that's what you need, commander, that's what you got.

And they just showed up. That was the president on Tuesday. We're hearing a lot about troop numbers

these days. But absent from almost all these discussions are mentions of the role private contractors

are playing in the war. In fact, that role is enormous. Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported

that the number of American-funded contractors in Iraq now exceeds the number of U.S. troops there.

But that was a rare piece of contractor news.

Deborah Avant is a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who studied the media profile of military contractors,

and she says the dearth of coverage is perfectly represented in the pages of the New York Times.

I found that basically it mentions troops about 10 times as often as it mentions contractors.

So even though an occasional article might hit the front pages, there's not

this sort of steady flow of information. The press is not capturing changes in the numbers of

contractors in the field in Iraq. When the president wanted to mobilize an additional 20,000 troops,

it caused a huge political uproar. But in fact, he had managed to mobilize many more than that

by sending contractors to the field way early in the insurgency. And that has continued.

How has it come to pass that this could all have taken place so under the radar of the media?

I think that one of the difficulties for news organizations has been that they're sort of set up

to cover the Pentagon on the one hand and to cover business on the other.

And covering contractors falls a bit between the cracks.

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