Sorry, Wingers: A New Study Confirms That The Press Doesn't Report Just Violence And Bad News From Iraq
December 19, 2007 -- 11:25 AM EST // //
So is the conservative critique of war coverage true? Has American public opinion on the war has been skewed by the media's tendency to only report violence and bad news from Iraq?
A new study has an answer to the question: Not so much.
Nearly half the stories Americans read and saw about Iraq through most of the year were about the daily violence there, but journalists appeared sensitive to how much that dominated coverage, a new report said.Though the study's conclusions are somewhat nuanced, it clearly concludes that barely more than a fourth of airtime and print space for the period in question was devoted to violence. And one number leaps out as very telling:Although violence made up 47 out of every 100 stories covered on television and in newspapers, it took up only 27 percent of the air time or print space through the end of October, according to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
That meant news organizations didn't give the stories inordinate play, explained Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director.
"They appear to be very sensitive to the notion that 'all you cover is bad news,'" he said.
Stories that tried to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of U.S. policy were mixed, the report said. Four in 10 concluded things were mixed, a third were pessimistic in tone and a quarter saw things were improving, the study said.This kind of analysis obviously has its limitations when it comes to reaching overall conclusions, but nonetheless, I think these numbers make the conservative critique awfully difficult to sustain. Only a third of stories assessed U.S. strategy pessimistically, a number that's significantly lower than the percentage of the American public that has this view.
Meanwhile, there is one number buried in the study that conservatives can -- and probably will -- cherry-pick to make their case: Only three percent of stories filed were about the lives of ordinary citizens. Of course, the study also notes that reporters say that the low number reflects the fact that the violence in the country prevents them from doing such stories. But wingers can just leave that inconvenient fact out if they feel like it.
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