NYT : News Coverage Shifts to Election From War in Iraq

News Coverage Shifts to Election From War in Iraq

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA | August 20, 2007

News coverage of the Iraq war fell sharply in the second quarter of the year, as the news media paid increased attention to the presidential campaign and the immigration debate, according to a detailed analysis to be released today.

As in the first quarter, CNN and MSNBC each devoted about twice as much time to the war as their cable competitor Fox News Channel, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research group. MSNBC stood apart in giving twice as much time to the presidential campaign as the other two.

The project began this year to keep a detailed track of news coverage in a selection of newspapers, cable news programs, popular Web sites and radio shows, as well as the broadcast networks’ nightly news and morning shows — 18,000 reports from 48 outlets from April to June. The results show sharp differences among competitors, and from one medium to another.

But a consistent finding was a fall-off in war reports, to 15 percent of the “news hole” (the available amount of editorial space) in the second quarter from 22 percent in the first quarter. While the first three months of the year were steeped in coverage of the debate in Washington over the war, the second quarter had far fewer reports of them, after Congress agreed to provide war financing without imposing withdrawal deadlines.

Coverage of events in Iraq and their consequences in the United States, like the return of wounded soldiers, held steady.

“It’s a lot easier to cover it as a political debate in Washington than to cover it on the ground in Iraq,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project, which is part of the Pew Research Center in Washington.

Cable news channels gave less time than most media to events in Iraq, but far more to the Washington debate. In broadcast television, PBS gave much more of its time to both aspects of the war than did the commercial networks.

The 2008 campaign was the most-covered story of the second quarter, getting 9 percent of the attention from all news media, the report says, but MSNBC stood out by devoting 21 percent of its time to the election contest.