Missing Iraq War Money Dominates Blogs

The discovery that billions of dollars intended for Iraq's post-war reconstruction have gone missing generated a major-and largely partisan-outcry from bloggers last week. For the week of June 13-17, 54% of the news links on blogs were about the lost Iraq money, more than four times the next biggest subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The only other time that Iraq has showed up among leading blog topics since the NMI began in January 2009 was the week of September 6-10, 2010. Interestingly, it was the same basic subject, the high cost of the Iraq War that triggered bloggers' interest then, as they linked to an article that revised upward a previous estimate that the conflict would cost $3 billion.