Media May Have an Agenda

March 27th, 2008 at 08:01pm Matt DiBari

In other news, the sun rises in the east.

Pew Research Center released a report yesterday on media coverage and the Iraq war. As Hot Air notes, the drop in media coverage seems to have begun in earnest right after David Petraeus’ report to Congress.

Nowhere was the drop-off in coverage more acute than with the policy debate thread. In January 2007, with the media anticipating a fierce battle over Iraq purse strings between Congress and the White House, the Iraq policy debate alone generated 17% of the coverage. In the first three weeks of March 2008, with no prospect of any significant changes in U.S. policy until at least the November election, that thread is down to 2%.

Pew suggests that along with the 2008 election coverage, the media just flat out couldn’t be bothered to report good news coming from Iraq.

But there is another key reason why the war has virtually disappeared from the headlines and talk shows these days — and that’s the situation inside Iraq itself. The reduction in violence on the ground that began late last year has coincided with a significant decrease in coverage from the war zone as well.

Through the first half of 2007, about half the stories from Iraq examined in a PEJ study were about the continuing drumbeat of daily violence. From July through October, that number fell to a little more than one-third. In November, stories filed from Iraq began to take greater notice of the surge’s success in reducing violence, even as the volume of coverage tapered off, evidence perhaps of the old adage that no news is good news. (So far in 2008, events on the ground in Iraq are accounting for only 2% of the newshole, although any sustained uptick in violence there could once again lead to an increase in coverage.)

The excuse offered in the report is that journalists find it too dangerous to move around and report on the economic and political situation in Iraq. But as Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out, that problem could be solved if the journalists would embed with the troops.

Of course, they did that at the beginning of the war and the media outlets decided the coverage wasn’t negative enough.

It would be funny if it wasn’t true.

Tags: iraq, John McCain, media, Media Bias

Entry Filed under: Campaign Issues, John McCain, Media Bias, War on Terror

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