For most of the Iraq war, we’ve heard from the White House that the news coverage of the war did not reflect the reality of it. We were told that things were much better than the mainstream media (MSM) would have us believe. After years of hearing this, it appears that Americans are finally starting to believe that news reports of Iraq are not all that accurate.
A majority of Americans — 56% — believe that the news media’s coverage of the situation in Iraq is generally inaccurate. About 4 out of 10 Americans agree that the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is accurate.
So the numbers aren’t quite where they should be, but more people are coming to the realization that we’re not getting quite the right picture from our “trusted” news sources.
Of course, Americans who believe that media coverage of the situation in Iraq is inaccurate could either believe that the media are painting too rosy of a picture of what is going on there. Or they could believe that the news media are painting too negative a picture (as has often been argued by the Bush administration and others who support the Iraq war).
To analyze these possibilities in more detail, the survey asked those who felt that the coverage was inaccurate to indicate if this belief was based on a perception that the media make the situation in Iraq look better than it actually is, or worse than it actually is.
[Text based chart cut - read full article for exact numbers which lead to:]
About one-third of Americans believe that the news media present too negative a picture of what is happening in Iraq; one out of five believe that the news media present too positive a picture, and the rest say that news media coverage is about right or have no opinion.
I truly believe my recent claims that much of our the news we get is negative because that’s what gets viewers, this generating better ratings, thus getting more advertising money for news-providers. I think more Americans are coming to realize this, too, and the above information from Gallup sure suggests this is happening. So while there are a lot of problems with the whole Iraq war, at least people are starting to see that some of the problems we’re told about might not be complete factual. Of course, there is a typical extreme party split between those who believe things are better, worse, or about what is shown on the news. But we can’t get through to everyone equally.
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