From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. After seven years, hundreds of billions of dollars, an unknown number of Iraqi deaths, nearly 35,000 U.S. injured and 4,400 U.S. dead.

President Obama announced this week that U.S. combat operations in Iraq

are over. Tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended.

Operation Iraqi freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their

country. That was his address Tuesday night from the Oval Office. And as one would expect, the Wednesday

papers led with the story. But by Thursday, the situation in Iraq had moved back to A4 in the New York Times and A8 in the Washington Post.

From cable news, it had vanished altogether. The U.S. combat role in one of the longest, most

contentious wars in American history has apparently ended as T.S. Eliot phrased it, not with a bang, but a whimper.

This creep towards the back of the paper, we suspect, will progress as hurricanes, oil rig fires,

and celebrity arrests make Obama's announcement old news. But if this coverage constitutes the

first draft of history, we wondered what effect will it have on

subsequent drafts. Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, and he joins us

once again. Hey, Doug, welcome back to the show. Well, thank you very much. So VJ Day, it wasn't. A little

understated the coverage?

Understated, to put it mildly. It was just like a blip on the radar screen. There was a speech by

President Obama prime time from the Oval Office, but the speech was combined with other things,

including an economic report card, which diluted the importance of the moment.

Perhaps because we're in an economic recession, perhaps because we are so mired in Afghanistan,

and people want to forget memories of the Iraqi war, it seems to have been kind of swept under

the rug and not covered properly, or at least in the way one would have thought so a few years ago.

Compared to me, please, the coverage of the end of this war with every previous war in which this country has engaged.

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