How Much Less Newsworthy Are Civilians in Other Conflicts?
Posted on AllSides March 19th, 2022
From The Left
During the invasions of their countries, US TV news was much more likely to talk to civilians from Ukraine (left, ABC, 2/26/22) than from Iraq (right, CBS, 3/19/13).
ANALYSIS
As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians.
To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments...
