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US tunes out world
Written by: Andrew Stroehlein
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Just when you thought US television news could not get any worse, along comes the regularly disturbing annual report of Andrew Tyndall, the man who has watched every single weekday nightly news broadcast in the US for twenty years.
In his minute-by-minute tally, Tyndall demonstrates how 2008 was a miserable year for international news reaching mass American audiences. "Coverage of foreign policy was the lowest in 21 years..." and "Both ABC and CBS set 21-year record lows for use of their foreign bureaus. If NBC had not been shilling in Beijing for NBC Sports' Olympics, its decline would have been greater."
Perhaps the most incredible part of Tyndall's 2008 review concerns Iraq. Given the huge investment of lives and dollars Americans have made in that country, total TV network news coverage of Iraq was shockingly low compared to previous years. From 4162 minutes in 2003 and 3053 minutes in 2004, it was then about 2000 minutes in each of the next three years. But in 2008, the combined figure for all three networks' coverage of Iraq was only 434 minutes. And that was the country they covered most...
Of course, when you expand the scope of interest to take in other TV news, print media, and radio, the situation in the US is somewhat better. Last week's coverage of the Gaza crisis, for example, dominated all other stories according to the News Coverage Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
But the flagship news programs of the beacon TV networks are in a different world -- or rather, not in the world much at all.
Every time I travel to the US, I think American television news cannot get any worse, and every time, I am proven wrong. Fortunately, on holiday in Florida in December, I didn't even bother to turn on the TV network news. I imagine most Americans who give any sort of a damn about the world are doing the same thing.
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3 responses to “US tunes out world”
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Journalist Andrew Stroehlein is Director of Media and Information for the International Crisis Group, the conflict resolution organisation, where he promotes responsible coverage of current and potential conflicts and helps draw attention to forgotten wars around the world.
09 Jan 2009 13:39:42 GMT
Unfortunately, you are so right on.....
Don't bother watching TV news any more. It isn't worth the time it takes to do it. Besides, it already a day or two old by the time it gets to TV.09 Jan 2009 20:32:44 GMT
We Americans haven't been able to get the television news networks to tell us what is really going on in our own country, let alone what's happening outside our borders. American television news networks are an utter disgrace. You can quote me on that.
09 Jan 2009 20:33:22 GMT
Although the number of news sources continues to rise because of the Internet, Americans seem to know -- and care -- as little about the rest world as they ever did.