The Irish press and the Iraq War: Real world cues, news values and the political calibration effect

This article presents the findings of a descriptive content analysis of three Irish ‘quality’ newspapers’ coverage of issues relating to the Iraq War during the period from 1 September 2002 to 31 December 2007 — The Irish Times, the Irish Independent and the Sunday Independent. It addresses the shortcoming in existing research on the Irish media’s coverage of the Iraq War and also contributes to the body of research already undertaken on different international media’s coverage of this war. Its central focus explores the influences that different contextually specific political, cultural and news factors have on media reportage. It is broadly situated within the agenda-setting research paradigm, but advocates a number of theoretical extensions of this paradigm. In particular, it is argued that rather than viewing media foreign news agendas as simplistic byproducts of media—political relations, they can be more usefully conceptualized as the outcomes of different processes of interaction between ‘real world’ cues defining the wider political environment and media factors, such as news values and sourcing strategies.