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Of all the words you could use to describe the reporting from Iraq, you could go through a bunch before you’d get to “too rosy.”

But a new Project for Excellence in Journalism survey of American reporters covering Iraq says that correspondents over there overwhelmingly believe the picture being painted for us here is accurate – with some even thinking it, yes, “too rosy.”

According to the Reuters story:

Nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists in Iraq say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit, despite a recent drop in violence attributed to the build-up of U.S. forces, a poll released on Wednesday said.

The survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed that many U.S. journalists believe coverage has painted too rosy a picture of the conflict…

"Eight in 10 journalists believe conditions have deteriorated for reporters since their own first posting in the country," the survey's authors said.

Before going any further, it’s critical to note that the actual percentage of the respondents who consider the coverage unrealistically positive was 15 percent, with 70 percent saying that the coverage, while admittedly negative, is accurate.

But much of the study’s other findings are jarring and disturbing.

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Having spent a number of years in the business of counting the amount of time that TV news gives to this story or the other, I always found the “Here’s What Was On” function of the job far less interesting than the “Here’s Who Covered What Differently” angle.

So it was with great interest that I read today’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report that summed up the first quarter of this year’s cable new agenda, breaking down what the three cable networks deemed newsworthy, and to what extent.

It’s not pretty. As much as it’s old hat to raise questions about Fox News Channel’s coverage of political issues, it was still surprising (even to a cynical eye) to see that FNC gave less than half the airtime that MSNBC did to coverage of the war in Iraq -- 15 percent of its airtime versus 31 percent for MSNBC. CNN devoted a quarter of its airtime to the war.

Another notable aspect of FNC’s news coverage? According to the report:

If Fox was less focused on the Iraq War, what took its place? Mostly—according to the numbers—Anna Nicole Smith. Coverage of her death trailed just barely the airtime spent on the Iraq policy debate, accounting for 9.6% of all the Fox content studied (versus 10.1% for the Iraq policy debate). Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).

And this information isn’t coming from a partisan source. It’s coming from the well-regarded Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Though Roger Ailes disagrees.)

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"The transformation facing journalism is epochal, as momentous as the invention of television or the telegraph, perhaps on the order of the printing press itself."

--"The State of the News Media" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as noted by the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the report here.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with its third annual report on “The State of the News Media” and, not surprisingly provides the industry with plenty to chew on. We’re still digesting it an will have more on it later but most of the coverage of the report thus far focuses on this finding:

The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame.

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