So says the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s first quarterly news coverage index report. Key findings:

The war in Iraq has dwarfed all other topics in the American news media in the early months of 2007—taking up more than three times the space devoted to the next most popular subject. But only a portion of this has focused on the state of things in Iraq itself, and even less about the plight of Iraqis and the internal affairs of their country, according to a new study of the American news media. […] Beyond Iraq, only one other story stands out above any others—and the war even looms as part of it. The presidential campaign of 2008, has received startlingly heavy coverage even though key primaries are nine months away, and the general election won’t occur for nearly a year and a half. The campaign has taken up 7% of the newshole so far this year, nearly twice the amount of the next most heavily covered story not related to Iraq. And in that, coverage of Democrats outweighed that of Republicans by roughly three-to-one. […] Virtually none of the campaign coverage in these early days tells much about where candidates would take the country, their policy proposals, record or character. Nine out of ten stories were about tactics and horse race.

I guess Al Gore and Newt Gingrich have a point. This was also interesting:

The online news sites studied have the broadest news agenda of all and the widest mix of international stories. Online news was also the only sector in which the events on the ground in Iraq—rather than the Washington-based policy debate—was the biggest story of the year to date.

The sites that make up that part of the index are: CNN.com, Yahoo News, MSNBC.com, Google News, AOL News.