The American media have finally thrown in the towel on the Iraq war debate. The Project for Excellence in Journalism or Journalism.org has found that media coverage of the subject has collapsed:
"News about the Iraq war last week also confirmed a recent pattern in the coverage. Given the significant U.S. military offensive and the announcement that 14 U.S. troops had died in a two-day period, events in Iraq constituted the second-biggest story. With a number of stories focused on care given to wounded veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, the impact of the war at home was also a top-10 story last week (eighth at 2%).
"At the same time, the Iraq policy debate—the Washington-based battle over war strategy—generated only 1% of last week’s coverage and failed to make the top-10 story list. Those findings are indicative of a trend in recent weeks in which coverage of the political debate over the war has diminished substantially.
"For the first three months of this year, PEJ found that the policy debate was the leading news subject by a large margin, accounting for 12% of all the coverage."
The group expects interest in Iraq policy to be dormant through the summer but surge again in September when US Commander, General Petraeus is scheduled to deliver his state-of-the-war report.
No comments:
Post a Comment