Alexandria, VA - A new Media Research Center study documents
that as conditions in Iraq improved over the course of the last
three months, ABC, CBS and NBC’s reporting on it decreased.
After over three years of the three major networks offering
extensive coverage of the failings in Iraq, and their placing a
skeptical spin on General Patraeus’s September 10th surge progress
report, their zeal for reporting on Iraq declined as the violence
and casualties did.
Each month, stories from and about Iraq have been less frequent: 178
in September, 108 in October and only 68 in November. It was nearly
a month before even one of the three (ABC World News on October 1st)
ran a positive report. The CBS Evening News has been particularly
egregious; in three months, they have proffered only three positive
stories, one from its Iraqi reporter.
MRC President L. Brent Bozell is not surprised.
“The networks have spent the last three years reporting the bad news
in Iraq with such apparent relish, often to the detriment of the
good that was there. As things improve and there is less of their
preferred negativity to deliver, they are delivering less.
“If things continue to improve in Iraq, we will undoubtedly see even
less coverage from the big three networks and find ourselves
thinking of 68 stories a month as the good old days.”
To schedule an interview with the study’s author Rich Noyes,
please contact Tim Scheiderer (x. 126) or Colleen O’Boyle (x. 122)
at 703.683.5004. To view the study, see www.mrc.org.
