2005 Annual Report - Network TV Content Analysis

The other major story of the year was the war in Iraq. What stood out in the coverage here? First, Iraq coverage had the largest percentage of stories given any topic. The percentages for PBS and the commercial networks stories were almost equal, with 25% of commercial networks stories about Iraq and 27% of the NewsHour stories. The figure for morning news was 12%. (Tyndall Research, coding every weekday newscast for the entire year, similarly found 21% of the time on the nightly newscasts was devoted to stories about Iraq.)

On the war, network nightly news coverage carried much less journalistic opinion than did election coverage. Fully 84% of it was free of overt journalist opinion. On PBS, not a single Iraq-related story included journalist opinion.

What about the tone of coverage of the war? Administration officials and various conservatives argued in 2004 that the coverage was heavily critical of President Bush, focusing on U.S. casualties and other setbacks rather than on positive developments.¹¹

Tone of Iraq Coverage

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

In the weeks studied here, the bulk of network coverage about the ongoing war was neutral, but, indeed, commercial evening and PBS coverage was nearly twice as likely to be negative as positive. Roughly 27% of coverage on both carried a decidedly negative tone while just 16% carried a decidedly positive one. Still, most commercial evening news coverage was neutral (44%) and another 13% were multi-subject stories for which tone did not apply. The PBS NewsHour tended to do more multi-faceted stories (40%) while 18% were neutral.

Source Transparency of Iraq Coverage

Commercial and Public Network News

Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding.

This is quite different from the tone of newspapers which were pretty evenly divided between carrying a decidedly positive and negative tone. Whether that is a sign of bias or an accurate reflection of events on the ground is beyond the scope of this research.

Morning news programs adopted a more upbeat tone toward the war - 31% positive, 19% negative - in keeping with the penchant for the "Yellow Ribbon Journalism" cited by Andrew Tyndall.

When it came to journalistic opinion and the war, the networks were much more circumscribed than they were about the campaign. In the evenings, journalistic opinion was found in 16% of the 167 of the commercial-network stories about Iraq, which roughly equaled the overall average for all commercial network news stories. None of the 68 PBS Iraq stories had journalist opinion. In the mornings, stories about Iraq were even freer of journalist opinion than in the evening - 10% had it (another 2% were clear opinion pieces or commentary where opinion was expected).

We also looked at the level of sourcing in the war coverage. Looking at Commercial and PBS war reports in the evenings were less likely than the coverage overall to carry the highest level of sourcing, four or more transparent sources. Morning news looked similar. A third offered no fully identified sources, as against 29% for evening news, and less than half that (15%) contained four or more.