No End to Media's Defeatism on Iraq

According to an ABC News/Time magazine survey of 1,700 Iraqi citizens, released in advance of historic parliamentary elections on Thursday, “surprising levels of optimism prevail in Iraq,” according to ABC’s polling director, Gary Langer. “Despite the daily violence there, most living conditions are rated positively, seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead.”

Of course, those optimistic Iraqis don’t watch ABC, CBS and NBC every night. A new Media Research Center study of network evening news coverage of Iraq during October and November found the networks maintained the same negative approach our team found during a review of Iraq news during the first nine months of 2005. In spite of a successful constitutional referendum in October, the start Saddam’s trial for mass murder, successful U.S. offensive campaigns along the Syrian border and the return of a number of cities and town to full Iraqi control, the networks continued to offer mainly downbeat coverage of the situation in Iraq.

"The most reprehensible part of this story is not that the MSM wishes we were failing in Iraq; the MSM wants to be instrumental in causing America to fail."

Correction ~
The most reprehensible part of this story is not that the MSM wishes we were failing in Iraq; the MSM IS INTENTIONALLY AND WILLFULLY WORKING to be instrumental in causing America to fail.

ROTFL... and they do this on the economy as well. Then they have the balls to sit there and ask the president "why do you think that you aren't getting any credit" and ponder to each other "why isn't he getting any credit for this good economy". Of course thats all after denying the good economy for dozens of months.

They are sick.

HIGHLIGHTS:

Postive, Negative, and 'Neutral' for stories that mixed the two. We could classify only 34 stories (10%) as positive or optimistic, compared to 200 (62%) that emphasized negativity or pessimism about the Iraq mission, a six-to-one disparity. (The remaining 90 stories were neutral.) During the first nine months of the year, we found 211 stories (15%) emphasizing positive developments, compared with 848 (61%) that relayed mainly bad news. For the year, the number of negative stories on Iraq stands at 1,048 (61%), to just 245 positive stories (14%).

One reason for all the negativity was heavy coverage of suicide bombings and other terrorist violence. The networks collectively aired 125 stories about such attacks, about 39 percent of the total. Some of the carnage seemed aimed at getting media coverage, and the networks did not resist those who murdered their way onto TV screens.

The networks also emphasized the number of American dead and wounded in Iraq, with 98 stories on casualties in October and November.

As we found earlier this year, few stories (just five in two months) featured stories of American soldiers’ heroism, while nearly four times as many (19) focused on allegations of U.S. wrongdoing, including the accidental killing of civilians and claims of prisoner mistreatment.

The networks devoted relatively heavy coverage (64 stories, or 20% of the total) to the debate over the war. That is a significant change in focus from the first nine months of 2005, when such stories only accounted for just seven percent of Iraq news. Continuing a trend that began in August with heavy coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war protests, the networks mainly focused on the complaints of those opposed to the administration’s Iraq policies.

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