How press has covered Iraq on the ground

Wednesday, Dec. 19—Americans received a grim picture of the war in Iraq in the first 10 months of 2007. Daily violence accounted for 47% of the stories studied. And of the stories that offered an assessment of the direction of the war, most were pessimistic, according to a new study of press coverage from Iraq from January to October.

In what Defense Department statistics show to be the deadliest year so far for U.S. forces in Iraq , journalists responded to the challenge of covering the ongoing violence in Iraq by limiting their interpretation of these violent events and keeping their reports short.

However, as time passed, narrative accounts of events on the ground seemed to brighten. Late summer and fall saw a decline of reports about daily attacks, as well as a decrease in the amount of coverage from the war-torn country overall. That shift in coverage also coincided with a general sense by the American public that the military efforts in Iraq were going “very” or “fairly” well.

This study suggests that a bigger issue is not how the media interprets events, but what kinds of events actually get covered. This question is especially important when examined in relation to extreme dangers and restrictions facing the war correspondents in Iraq . These reporters believe that they adequately covered the military’s actions, but that they could have improved coverage on the lives of Iraqis. The results of the content analysis add validity to their assessments.

These are some of the findings of a study of more than 1,100 stories from January through October from 40 different news outlets conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute that examines the press.


Read the full report.

Among the report’s major findings:

* Any suggestion that the coverage is anti-Bush or anti-military is not supported by the findings. The coverage of U.S. policy was decidedly balanced. It was coverage of the Iraqi government and the country’s future stability that were more pessimistic.

* Daily accounts of violence made up 47% of all stories studied, but because many of these stories were short, that represented a 27% of the time and space—or newshole—of the coverage studied.

* The coverage overall was U.S. centric in subject matter. About half of all the coverage from Iraq was about American military and U.S. officials. Roughly another 10% was about private contractors, mostly Blackwater.

* Coverage of Iraqi civilians, by contrast, made up far less, 3% of stories and 5% of overall newshole.

* Despite enormous difficulty in getting access to sources, Americans did get a wide range of perspectives. Fully 40% of stories (representing 61% of the newshole) carried the views of multiple of types of stakeholders.