20 August 2007Yahoo! News
US media reports related to the war in Iraq fell dramatically in the second quarter of this year, a new study revealed Monday, as the 2008 presidential race gathered pace.
A report by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in the three-month period covering April, May and June, reports on Iraq tumbled from 22 to roughly 15 percent.
That fall was attributed to a decline in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, which slumped by 42 percent after Democrats failed to impose timetables in legislation of the war, the study said.
Coverage of the war was divided into three strands -- events in Iraq (seven percent), Iraq policy debate (seven) and Iraq homefront (two) -- according to the survey of 13 newspapers, eight radio outlets, cable and network television.
If the three strands of the Iraq story were viewed separately, the study said the biggest single story of the second quarter was the 2008 presidential campaign with around nine percent.
Other stories to make the top 10 were the Virginia Tech shooting massacre, which accounted for five percent of the news, and the immigration debate, which took six percent. Global warming and terrorism had one percent coverage.
But there was no place on the list for Paris Hilton.
Despite a massive media circus which surrounded the celebrity socialite's imprisonment, she failed to make a dent in the overall figures.
"Paris Hilton is no Anna Nicole Smith," the study said, describing her "jailhouse drama" as a fleeting one-week story that did not match the frenzied coverage that followed Smith's death during the first quarter of the year.
