Oliver Willis

A: The right-wing Media Research Center, that’s who.

The MRC’s latest “study,” titled “TV’s Bad News Brigade,” which analyzes television news coverage of the Iraq war, is no different. The “study” charges that television news is “giving the public an inordinately gloomy portrait of the situation,” while “the positive accomplishments of U.S. soldiers and Iraq’s new democratic leaders [are] being lost in a news agenda dominated by assassinations, car bombings and casualty reports.”

The obvious question, which the MRC never addresses, is what exactly is “inordinate” about the gloominess of the coverage. The “study” has no referent of what accurate coverage might be. Any news story that reports on terrorist acts or political instability seems to have been labeled “pessimistic.” We say “seems to” because the MRC website contains no description of the coding instrument used to derive the “study’s” figures nor any link to the raw data. Rather, the “study” contains extensive anecdotes about what MRC considers “positive” and “negative” coverage of developments in Iraq.

So what exactly constitutes a “negative” story in the MRC’s eyes? A hint is provided by the fact the report describes bombings and American casualties as “pessimistic developments”; at another point, American casualties are described as “another discouraging topic.” But the study ignores the relationship between reporting from Iraq and actual events in Iraq. For example, the study notes that just over half of the network stories in January and February “presented a negative slant” on the situation in Iraq, but that number “swelled to 73 percent” in August and September. But the study made no mention of the fact that U.S. deaths in Iraq from hostile action in January and February totaled 96 and “swelled” to 119 in August and September.