Diversity in Foreign News in US Newspapers Before and After the Invasion of Iraq

The objective of this study is to explore how the Iraq War affected the patterns of newspapers’ foreign news coverage, specifically how the war affected the quality of foreign news in three prominent US newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald in 2001, 2003, and 2005. Diversity was adopted as a criterion to measure the quality of foreign news coverage, employing the Herfindahl Index to calculate the level of diversity. The study reveals that, in general, the diversity of sources, geographic origins and topics significantly decreased after the start of the war. This was due to the pattern of concentration on a few categories. After the invasion of Iraq, newspapers’ preferences for government sources, Middle East origins, military/defence related stories and news about international politics increased.

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