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NEW YORK 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.

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.

After peaking in May, the reports on violence went down and the overall view of what was going on in Iraq brightened, the report said. The project examined 1,100 stories from 40 news outlets and did a separate survey of views of reporters in Iraq.

One print reporter in Iraq told the project about concern over whether the reports of violence put things in context. "The greatest tragedy of the war has been how the media has in some way bored its audience with the violence," the reporter 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.

"The press is much more pessimistic about the Iraqi government than it is about the U.S. government or policies," Rosenstiel said. "The notion that there is an anti-Bush bias isn't really supported in the results."

Only about 3 percent of the stories filed were about the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, the project found. That reflected a frustration reporters frequently mentioned in the survey that violence prevented them from moving freely enough to tell that story, Rosenstiel said.

During November, the project found a distinct change in coverage to reflect a more promising view of what is going on in Iraq. The study also found a drop in the number of stories about Iraq getting air time and print space — "validation, perhaps, of the old adage that no news is good news," the study concluded.