MRC's Bozell On Media Ignoring Good News in Iraq

MRC President Brent Bozell appeared on the June 24 "Hannity & Colmes" to comment on a trend in Iraq reporting that conservatives have known for a while and the New York Times is only now catching on to: the media love to report negative developments from Iraq, while downplaying or ignoring positive developments such as the succeess of the surge or the exonerations of the Haditha "massacre" Marines.

Here's an excerpt of Bozell from the segment:

BRENT BOZELL, MRC President: There's a terrible adage in journalism: good news is no news, bad news is great news. And that's the coverage that we've seen in Iraq. Countless studies have been done, we've done studies on this, showing that as things got worse and worse, you had more and more coverage. But suddenly the surge came around and as the surge took off and was successful, the coverage went down. You see just the other day where the military announced that violence is down 89 percent, and yet NBC and CBS didn't think that was news. Now, they didn't need to send a reporter to Iraq to report that one, they could have done that from their bureaus.

SEAN HANNITY, co-host: Here the Haditha Marines that [Rep.] John Murtha [D-Pa.] says they killed innocent civilians in cold blood because they couldn't take the pressure, seven of the eight charged have now been exonerated. The New York Times prints nine front page stories, I think you had told me earlier 35 altogether, not one front page story on the -

BOZELL: I'm glad the New York Times reported about the networks' lack of coverage, the flip side though is the New York Times is no different. The New York Times, the print press has done the exact same thing. There's a great example: Haditha. You've got 35 major stories on Haditha, now you've got one exoneration after another, none of it is news.