What Iraq War?
While the War Without End™ drags on and on it seems that our media has totally forgotten about our various ongoing conflicts. We'll definitely be talking about this on the show today:
According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)If that isn't bad enough, no American network has a full time correspondent in Afghanistan right now. How can things that are so important (you know, multibillion dollar wars where thousands of people are getting killed) be treated with such indifference by our media? Producers often blame their lack of war coverage on the low ratings such segments get. But is this a lame cop-out or are we all as news consumers partly to blame?
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
|