UPDATED - ColdType

actions to that of international politics.
By far the majority of the coverage on evening
news programs in the U.S. focused only on U.S.
military actions. On BBC news, in comparison,
U.S. politicians and military personnel made up
25.1% of the featured protagonists, while British
politicians and military personnel comprised
12.8%. German and British news programs also
referred much more often to the allies as an
entity than U.S. news programs (ARD: 8.9%, ZDF:
9.5%, RTL: 9.5%, BBC: 9.9%).
When U.S. politicians and military personnel
were the subject of the coverage, it was most frequently
in the context of military actions, compared
to which the consequences and political
ramifications of the war received only scant
attention. In the context of U.S. society, as mentioned
before, only NBC showed concern for politics
to a significant extent, with 86 statements
(ABC: 5, NBC: 4). On German news programs,
reports on military actions figured less prominently
in the coverage of public broadcasters
ARD and ZDF than on RTL, the private network
(ARD: 44.7%, ZDF: 47.3%, RTL: 55%). The BBC
spent 58.3% on its news coverage reporting on
military actions, slightly more than the Americans
(ABC: 52.3%, NBC: 55.8%, NBC: 56.3%).
In comparison, international politics played a
far greater role on ARD and ZDF, with 20.9% and
17% of the coverage, respectively, than on any
other network in the three countries. BBC news
programs devoted 9.1% of their coverage to international
politics; among U.S. network news the
share of the topic exceeded 10% only on NBC
(ABC: 9.7%, NBC: 12.7%, NBC: 9.8%).
One could argue this merely goes to show that
there is no room for politics on the battlefield,
but it also raises the question about whether the
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
271
overwhelming focus on military actions, both in
the overall coverage and in regard to politicians
and military personnel, may not have served to
obscure and detract from the political issues
underlying the conflict. Coverage of international
politics suffered the most from the latter.
The rule of thumb here seems to be, the
greater the share of coverage of military actions
on any network, the lower the share of coverage
of international politics – a phenomenon not limited
to TV news in coalition countries.
We should also note that there is no clear correlation
between the share of coverage of military
actions on any of the analyzed programs
and the share of reports filed by journalists
embedded with troops for each. Several of the
non-U.S. news programs, including the BBC,
managed to report just as much on military
actions as their U.S. counterparts without relying
on embedded journalists, instead supplementing
their reports with footage bought from
U.S. or Arabic networks or reporting from Baghdad
or the studio.
The narrow focus on the battlefield was thus
largely endemic, although reports from embedded
journalists certainly shortened the supply
lines for the newsrooms of all analyzed programs.
As a consequence, the coverage of the
war was largely de-politicized and journalists
were running the danger of merely providing
infotainment instead of contributing to public
debate by focusing more on the political issues
surrounding the war, both domestically and
internationally.
TV news programs outside of the U.S. tended
to focus more on Iraqi civilians, though not by as
much as one might have expected. On German
news programs, around 15% of protagonists fea-