The Public Weighs In On Media Coverage of Iraq

One of the questions in the new CBS Poll (pdf) dealt with how Americans feel about the way the media describe the situation in Iraq. The poll found that 24% of respondents felt the media were "making things in Iraq sound better than they really are," 31% felt the media were making things sound "worse than they really are," and 35% felt the media were "describing the situation in Iraq accurately." (10% did not give an answer.)

It's been interesting to watch how partisans on both sides interpret these results. Over at conservative Newsbusters, Brent Baker complained that the "Evening News," in discussing the poll, ignored the news that roughly a third of respondents said the media were describing the situation as worse than it actually is, presumably because of CBS' liberal bias.

At the liberal Think Progress, meanwhile, Judd Legum saw the results as evidence that the "Public Rejects Right-Wing Narrative On Media Coverage Of Iraq," as the hedline put it. "A new CBS poll shows that about 60% of Americans believe that the media is reporting things in Iraq either accurately or better than they really are," writes Legum.

To better understand these results, it's worth looking at the party breakdown of the responses. Among Republicans, perhaps unsurprisingly, only 8% thought the media were making things in Iraq sound better than they really are, whereas 57% thought the media were making things sound worse than they really are. 30% of Democrats, meanwhile, thought the media were making things sound better than they really are, and only 14% thought they were making things sound worse than they really are. (Democrats, incidentally, seem to have the most faith in the media, with 43% saying that the media were describing the situation in Iraq accurately. Only 30% of Republicans said the same.)

Now consider how people responded to the previous question, which asks respondents if they think George W. Bush, when he talks about how things are going for the United States in Iraq, is making things sound better than they are, worse than they are, or if he's describing the situation accurately. The key finding? 43% of Republicans think the president is making things in Iraq sound better than they actually are. That figure isn't quite as high as the percentage of Republicans who think the media is making things look worse than they are, but it's still quite high. That seems to suggest that while many Republicans don't totally trust what the media reports, they don't totally trust what the president says, either, and thus presumably conceive of the reality in Iraq as somewhere between the portrait painted by the press and the one painted by the president.

One more point to consider: while 26% of independents think the press is making things look worse than they are, a whopping 71% think the president is putting a happy face on the situation. The press' credibility may be relatively low among independents – only 31 percent said the media describe the situation in Iraq accurately – but it's better, at the moment, than that of the president when it comes to the war. (If you want to look at these results yourself, click here for the poll and scroll down to questions 46 and 47. And for those of you curious about weighting issues in CBS News polls, see our previous post on that topic.)