The RI study surveyed 1,550 people in 100 markets that were part of RI's mammoth Impact study of readership begun in 2000. The study was planned before the war to test how readership was affected by such a big event.

RI director John Lavine was quoted as telling the Newspaper Association of America (NAA): "By a large margin, TV won in Iraq -- even in areas that papers expected to win." He was quoted as saying that newspapers started at a disadvantage as most of them raised questions about the motives of the war.

Newspapers tended not to present the "gung-ho patriotism" served up by TV outlets such as Fox News Channel, which received criticism from around the globe but remained wildly popular in the United States, said the MediaGuardian.

The RI study stated that newspaper readers rated the performance of television news during the Iraq war as the best news media in many areas. TV news was described as the media that was most complete, most accurate, most engaging, and that offered the best experts and greatest variety of viewpoints.

The study also indicated that the most surprising result was the fact that "moderate" or "heavy" newspaper readers did not pick up a paper more frequently; or spend more time reading it; or read more of the paper -- the three factors that make up the RBS, or Reader Behavior Score, which RI measures on a scale of 1 to 7.

Lavine was also quoted as saying that readership by "light" and young readers did increase modestly but he added these readers are unlikely to stick to this higher level of reading.

Lavine told the NAA attendees that newspapers did not target light or young readers by appropriately their war coverage.

Some of the increase in TV and Web viewership was directly attributable to newspapers, which provided both of those other media with content and journalists. However, some journalists believed technology led TV to focus on images instead of information. Cable news is "such a hungry beast that they just shovel stuff in," some of them were quoted as saying.