War Time Airtime

The NYTimes’ Brian Stelter takes Lara Logan’s recent appearance on The Daily Show and gives a deeper look the airtime the networks are giving the Iraq war:

• Lara Logan, CBS News: the Baghdad bureau was “drastically downsized” in the spring, Logan tells Stelter. “The network now keeps a producer in the country, making it less of a bureau and more of an office,” Stelter writes.

• Terry McCarthy, ABC News: “I’ve never met a journalist who hasn’t been frustrated about getting his or her stories on the air.” A decline in the relative amount of violence “is taking the urgency out” of some of the coverage, he told Stelter.

• Anita McNaught, Fox News Channel: “The violence itself is not the story anymore,” she said. She counted eight reports she had filed since arriving in Baghdad six weeks ago.

• Richard Engel, NBC News: says he found his producers “very receptive to stories about Iraq.”

Stelter writes about how Logan “begged for months to be embedded with a group of Navy Seals.” When she came back with the story, a CBS producer said to her, “One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform.” Logan told Stelter the producer no longer worked at CBS.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.