Not that this should come as a surprise, but...
Another major change in the period from April through June of 2007 was that press coverage of the war in Iraq declined markedly. Together the three major storylines of the war—the policy debate, events on the ground, and the impact on the U.S. homefront—filled 15% of the total newshole in the quarter, a drop of roughly a third from the first three months of the year, when it filled 22%.
That decrease resulted largely from a decline in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, which fell 42% from the first to second quarter, once the Democrats failed to impose timetables in legislation funding of the war. <snip>
Among the findings in the second quarterly report of the PEJ’s News Coverage Index:
•After Democrats received more than twice the coverage of Republicans in the first quarter of the year (61% to 24%), coverage evened out in the second quarter. Democrats received 42% of the coverage versus 41% for Republicans. That Republican gain came largely from a one month surge in May.
•Attention to the Iraq war fell across all five media sectors in the second quarter. The bulk of the decline occurred after May 24, when Congress approved funding without including troop withdrawal timetables, a move widely viewed as a White House victory. In all, the policy debate filled 7% of the space or airtime in the quarter, down from 12% in the three months of the year.
•There continue to be clear differences in the news judgments of different cable channels. As in the first quarter, the Fox News Channel devoted roughly half as much coverage to the war (8%) than its rivals, CNN (18%) and MSNBC (15%). On the subject of the presidential campaign, MSNBC stood out, providing more than twice the percent of airtime of either competitor.
•When it came to party breakdown of the campaign coverage, the cable distinctions were found not across networks but across programs. On CNN, for instance, Paula Zahn focused more on Democrats, while Anderson Cooper spent more time on Republicans. On the Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly and Shepard Smith focused most on Democrats, while Hannity & Colmes and Brit Hume were more evenly divided between the two parties.(Emphasis added.)
http://www.journalism.org/node/7069
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