PEJ Study: War Coverage Down, Campaign Reporting Up

By: Joe Strupp Coverage of events related to the Iraq War decreased during the second quarter of 2007, but remained the top news issue, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which noted 15% of stories across print, broadcast and online dealt with Iraq-related issues.

That is down from 22% during the first quarter of the year. As in the first quarter, the Fox News Channel devoted roughly half as much coverage to the war (8%) than its rivals, CNN (18%) and MSNBC (15%).

Rising during the same three-months was reporting on the 2008 presidential campaign, which came in second with 9%. The Virginia Tech massacre, meanwhile, brought the most coverage in a single week, with just more than half of all reporting during that week in April on the shooting spree that left 33 dead.

"And the once-lopsided gap favoring Democrats over Republicans in campaign coverage became more balanced," the study, released Monday, said. "In the derby for 'free media' exposure, Barack Obama overtook fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, who led in the first three months of the year?Among Republicans, the race for media attention was a tight contest among John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. And one unannounced candidate, actor and sometime politician Fred Thompson, emerged as a leading recipient of coverage even without formally entering the race."

Newspapers gave 44% of coverage to Republicans, with 36% to Democrats. Headlines and leads, however, favored Democratic names, with their identities found in 772 of them, while Republicans made up just 371. "On the subject of the presidential campaign, MSNBC stood out, providing more than twice the percent of airtime of either competitor."

The report stated that the Iraq decease "resulted largely from a decline in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, which fell 42% from the first to second quarter, once the Democrats failed to impose timetables in legislation funding of the war."

The PEJ study focused on 48 different outlets from five sectors of the media -- newspapers, broadcast television, radio, online, and cable.

It reviewed 13 weeks of data that spanned more than 18,000 stories, "allowing for deeper analysis across time, including comparisons of different news organizations and in the case of television, even different programs on the same network.

Among the findings:

? "After Democrats received more than twice the coverage of Republicans in the first quarter of the year (61% to 24%), coverage evened out in the second quarter." Democrats received 42% of the coverage versus 41% for Republicans. The Republican gain came largely from a one month surge in May.

? Attention to the Iraq war fell across all five media sectors in the second quarter, with the bulk of the decline after May 24 when Congress approved funding without including troop withdrawal timetables. "In all, the policy debate filled seven percent of the space or airtime in the quarter, down from 12% in the three months of the year."

? The Virginia Tech massacre was the biggest story for any given week, accounting for 51% of all coverage between April 15-20. "But the media?s attention to the story was fleeting: by the end of April, coverage had virtually disappeared."

The study spanned 13 newspapers, eight radio outlets (a mix of talk, public radio, and headline feeds), five of the top online sites, several hours a day of all three cable news channels and both network morning and evening newscast.