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.

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