Is FNC Worse on Iraq Than CNN or MSNBC?

Talking to our Matt Sheffield on "Fox & Friends" this morning, FNC's Steve Doocy referred to an AP story that his network has noted repeatedly in recent days: that the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that FNC's doing less Iraq coverage than CNN or MSNBC. David Bauder sought out the MRC for balance, and we said the problem we have with the media elite is that they clearly see Fox as pandering to an audience and they don't see CNN as pandering to an audience. Media liberals routinely isolate Fox as a less journalistic, more propagandistic outlier -- they don't see networks inside their liberal bubble as the slightest bit questionable.

A more thorough study of Iraq coverage on cable is the MRC study by Noyes, Whitlock, and McCormack. As for PEJ, I made this breakdown of their campaign analysis on NRO Media Blog:

To be precise, they produce what we’ve called Swiss-cheese studies. Their studies are not comprehensive, but a series of little snapshots making random selections of certain hours of TV content and not others. Look at their methodology page. For MSNBC, they coded two out of these four programs per night: Tucker, Hardball, Countdown, and Scarborough Country. Obviously, if you only code frenzied Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, you’d get a much different result than if you analyzed Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough. (Or at least we can hope.) Then they only watch the first half-hour of each program, not the whole thing.

Then notice they didn’t actually watch TV coverage, but just read transcripts, and squeezed down the sample further: “For both newspapers and the television transcripts, searches were conducted using the last names of the candidates that appeared in either the headline or lead paragraphs of the story. The reason for searching for the names in the headline or lead paragraphs was to determine the number of stories that focused on the candidates. Another option would have been to search for mentions anywhere in the article or transcript which would have yielded more results, but would have also included many stories where the candidates were not central to the story.”

Studies like these might give the public a vague sense of TV coverage trends. (For example, I think it’s right that the Democrat presidential race is getting more publicity than the Republicans. Finding the reason for that is a debatable point: is it a natural liberal media attraction? Are those candidates just more doggone interesting? Or is there simply a belief that the Democrats are the early slam-dunk winners in the media’s conventional wisdom factory?) But these PEJ numbers also suggest the pitfalls of relying on pollsters who say they polled across the United States but in fact only polled in 13 states. As Brent Bozell put it, PEJ studies can be “about as comprehensive with statistics as James Carville has hair.”