ABC News returns to Iraq
Network revisits war report series
The net has held a national public opinion poll in Iraq, asking the country’s citizens to assess their own safety and air their views on U.S. policy in the wake of the war.
The series will feature Bill Weir, who will anchor “Good Morning America” from Baghdad on Saturday and Sunday, and Iraq-based Terry McCarthy.
McCarthy noted that the series, which will begin airing on “Good Morning” this Saturday and run through the following week, is intended to focus on the way Iraq perceives America rather than the other way around.
“This is not about whether a president has made a bad decision; it’s about the 25 million Iraqis,” McCarthy explained. “The data won’t be released until next Monday, but broadly, it’s going to reflect an increase in security conditions, and to put some flesh on the statistics, we’ve been doing interviews. Some of the individual stories are heartbreaking.”
The decision of ABC News and producer David Westin to dust off the series in the middle of the campaign primaries is a counterintuitive one, since the net’s political coverage gave “World News With Charles Gibson” a strong viewership bump last week, with an average of about 9 million total viewers and 2.8 million (marginally less than NBC News) in key demos.
McCarthy suggests, however, that the series “adds in value each time we come back, because we can see that six months ago, people were very pessimistic and now things seem to be on an upward swing.” This will be the seventh installment of “Where Things Stand.”
The series will appear on “World News,” “World News Sunday,” “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” “Good Morning America” and “Nightline.”
