UPDATED - ColdType

But, surprisingly, protests did not play a particularly
great role on European news either.
In the overall comparison of coverage of
protests, Germany’s ARD, with 5.2% of its coverage,
is alone at exceeding the share of coverage
ABC granted to protests. On the BBC, protests
were the main focus of only 1.3% of the coverage.
There were also no great variations internationally
concerning the frequency with which the
legitimacy of the war was the central aspect of
the coverage – around 4% of the coverage in Germany,
Britain and the U.S. dealt with this topic.
Another similarity between news programs in
the three countries is the extent to which they
reported on the justifications for war provided
by the allies. The combined topics peace, human
rights and weapons of mass destruction comprised
a mere 1.2% of the coverage on ARD news
programs and even less on all others. In the
news coverage as on the ground in Iraq, WMDs
were mostly absent. The combined topics will of
the people, democracy and dictatorship, on the
other hand, received significantly more coverage.
In the U.S., all three networks dedicated
more than 3% of the coverage to topics associated
with the liberation of the Iraqi people, with
NBC in the lead (ABC: 3.1%, NBC: 3.1%, NBC:
3.6%).
The U.N. dropped out of the coverage almost
entirely with the beginning of the war. On the
rare occasions in which it was the subject of
reports, it was mostly in terms of politics, followed
by discussions of Iraq after the end of the
war. Of the three evening news programs in the
U.S., only NBC was reporting on the international
organization in the context of military
actions or their consequences, but even here,
mentions of the U.N. were so scarce as to be
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almost negligible.
In Germany, the public broadcasters ARD and
ZDF in particular reported much more frequently
on the U.N., while the BBC’s reports on
the U.N. were almost on par with NBC’s in terms
of their frequency (ARD: 2.3% of all reports, BBC:
0.9%, NBC: 1%).
Compared to the other two networks, ABC
stood out in giving space to voices of dissent and
relied less on embedded journalists. It showed a
greater capacity for self-criticism and offered a
more balanced – though highly polarized –
depiction of the American President. ABC also
featured a higher share of footage originating
with Arabic networks, showed a greater interest
in the rebuilding of Iraq and the consequences of
war and gave slightly more room to Iraqi casualties
than the other two news programs. NBC’s
coverage was less balanced in most of these categories,
but did comparatively well in the depiction
of American dead and wounded. Of all three,
Dan Rather’s NBC EVENING NEWS went to the
most extremes, firmly toeing the government
line in terms of its tone of coverage of the war
and in the issues it chose to disregard. NBC was
also among the highest in using emotionally
charged coverage (5.2% of all verbal and visual
statements).
The German way of reporting
– a good example?
THE war is over but the problems still remain in
post-war Iraq. In German TV news, the military
actions had been depicted largely as a U.S. war
against Iraqi civilians. The Americans were the
subject of criticism on all three analysed news
programs, particularly on private Broadcaster