2004 Annual Report - Magazine Content Analysis

How did the news magazines cover the situation in Iraq during the weeks studied in depth? None of the issues studied were during combat operations, though two fell in the weeks surrounding battle, February 17 and April 7. (The other two weeks studied were June 16 and October 6.) In these four issues, the war in Iraq accounted for more than a fifth (22 percent) of all stories and roughly a third (32 percent) of all the space.

These stories were also more likely than others to be long and in depth. Fourteen percent of the Iraq stories were longer than 2,000 words, compared with 6 percent of stories overall. Only a third (34 percent) were 500 words or fewer (versus half overall).

As with the coverage overall, these stories were not generally framed around an institution or a person. Only 3 percent of the Iraq stories in each magazine cast President Bush in the role as protagonist in the story and only 5 percent cast his administration generally as the protagonist. The most likely protagonist was some other federal politician or government official (9 percent).

There were also differences in the way that the three magazines covered the situation. Time devoted the most space to the war, 37 percent, compared to 34 percent for Newsweek and 24 percent for U.S. News. And again, Time had more long stories (seven stories in the four issues studied were more than 2,000 words). Newsweek ran six long stories in the four issues studied and U.S. News ran two long stories.