The Press at War (Outstanding read re. MSM bias)

The Wall Street Journal ^ | November 6, 2006 | James Q. Wilson

[Zakeet]

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now.

Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. About 40% of the stories reported terrorist attacks; scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts.

When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89% were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94% were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.

[GOPJ]

Ping

[LZ_Bayonet]

"Journalists reported most events favorably for the American side from August 1965 to January 1968, but that attitude began shifting with press coverage of Sen. J. William Fulbright's hostile Senate hearings and climaxed with the Tet offensive in January 1968.

Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan. And in the Iraq War, they have kept up a drumbeat of negativity that has had a big effect on elite and public opinion alike. Thanks to the power of these media organs, reduced but still enormous, many Americans are coming to see the Iraq War as Vietnam redux."

IMHO, having lived through the '60's - The greatest danger is in the combination of the two elements; hearings and the still enormous power of the MSM. If the Dems win the House and/or the Senate, they will provide their MSM wing with whatever it takes to lose the war.

[tillacum]

They'll fall over dead before they print anything complimentary to Our Troops. As far as I know not one of the presstitutes of the screaming media, FOX exempt, have been in the military service, they only observe it with a jaudiced eye. They are a pitiful lot, really, they don't even check their news sources anymore and tell out and out lies.

[listenhillary]

Bump

[GOPJ]

The issue continues to be: How do we get accurate news DESPITE the lamestream media?

When the question is "news", the answer is FreeRepublic...

[an amused spectator]

Thanks for the ping!

One of the money quotes:

Sociologist James D. Wright directly measured the impact of press coverage by comparing the support for the war among white people of various social classes who read newspapers and news magazines with the support found among those who did not look at these periodicals very much. By 1968, when most newsmagazines and newspapers had changed from supporting the war to opposing it, backing for the war collapsed among upper-middle-class readers of news stories, from about two-thirds who supported it in 1964 to about one-third who supported it in 1968. Strikingly, opinion did not shift much among working-class voters, no matter whether they read these press accounts or not. Affluent people who read the press apparently have more changeable opinions than ordinary folks. Public opinion may not have changed much, but elite opinion changed greatly.