According to a new report, you had a 73 per cent chance of hearing the views of Fox News's on-air editorial staff in that cable news station's reportage on Iraq last year -- way more than the other two main cable channels.

More from the Washington Post article:

In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views.

These findings -- the figures were similar for coverage of other stories -- "seem to challenge" Fox's slogan of "we report, you decide," says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In a 617-page report, the group also found that "Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals," while CNN is "the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view."

The project defines opinion as views that are not attributed to others. ...

The project describes cable news reporting as pretty thin compared with the ABC, NBC and CBS evening newscasts. Only a quarter of the cable stories examined contained two or more identifiable sources, compared with 49 percent of network evening news stories and 81 percent of newspaper front-page stories.

But I expect it would be thinner. In cable, as on the Internet, the emphasis (rightly or wrongly) is on speed. Networks craft their reports over the course of a day; on cable, you might have to turn something around in a matter of minutes.

They're just different media forms, and I don't know if it's fair to compare the two, let alone compare them with print.

Anyway, the cable stuff is just one part of The State of the News Media 2005.