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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (778)	4/28/2003 4:11:09 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

From Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz - the American attention span is brief and self-centered as always. "Media coverage of world affairs, meanwhile, has been withering on its own. Except in time of war or natural disaster, many news executives, particularly in television, concluded more than a decade ago that Americans had little interest in news beyond their borders. Media analyst Andrew Tyndall says the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts plummeted from 4,032 minutes of coverage from other countries in 1989 to 1,382 minutes in 2000, before rebounding to 2,103 minutes last year. Tyndall attributes the steep decline to the end of the Cold War and network budget cuts that slashed the number of overseas bureaus. Newspapers stretched their limits during the war. At the Chicago Tribune, the space for foreign news increased by more than a quarter -- and the paper made good use of a foreign staff that has grown from 10 to 15 reporters since 2001. "After 9/11, there was a sense of vindication at this institution for spending the money on foreign coverage," said foreign editor McMahon. Could the modest rebound in foreign coverage continue? History suggests otherwise. "Within six months of the end of the first Gulf War, Iraq disappeared from the daily coverage," Tyndall said. The Tyndall Report shows 1,177 minutes of network reporting on Iraq in January 1991, when the war started, but just 48 minutes in August 1991. The war in Afghanistan received 306 minutes of coverage on the newscasts in November 2001, but that dropped to 28 minutes by February 2002, and last month it was one minute. Since Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed, the media's attention has started to drift. Two-thirds of the embedded reporters have left their units. The hot story on the cable networks in recent days was the murder of pregnant California woman Laci Peterson. NBC's "Today" did a segment on a miracle dog who survived being hit by a car. Time's cover last week dealt with women and heart disease, not war."