ABSTRACT
The Iraq War News Project had two distinct goals. The meta-theoretical goal was to examine the efficacy of the Network Agenda Setting (NAS) Model in the context of a large and complex set of issue attributes. This goal was suggested by Lei Guo in the early stages of exploring the third level of agenda setting. Subsequently, the news coverage of the opening two years of the Iraq War was identified as an appropriate setting for achieving this meta-goal. Examination of this news coverage identified 31 issue attributes of the Iraq War, ranging from military activity to domestic and international politics. Substantively, the goal in examining this news coverage of the Iraq War in the New York Times and other newspapers around the world was to test a series of hypotheses about the degree of similarity in the news coverage of this major international event in newspapers with diverse cultural settings and diverse political stances regarding the war. The first study out of this international project was published in Journalism Studies (Guo et al., 2015). By including more countries into the analysis, this chapter presents a more comprehensive view about how the news media organizations across the globe pictured the Iraq War.
