From a New York Times story on foreign correspondents’ frustration with coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars:
Coverage of the war in Afghanistan has increased slightly this year, with 46 minutes of total coverage year-to-date compared with 83 minutes for all of 2007. NBC has spent 25 minutes covering Afghanistan, partly because the anchor Brian Williams visited the country earlier in the month. Through Wednesday, when an ABC correspondent was in the middle of a prolonged visit to the country, ABC had spent 13 minutes covering Afghanistan. CBS has spent eight minutes covering Afghanistan so far this year.
You get that? We’re on track this year for eleven extra minutes of TV coverage of what is, according to the U.S. intelligence community, most scholars, even General Petraeus, the most important fight we are fighting. Baby steps, I suppose.
Meanwhile, there was most likely high-level involvement by the U.S. embassy in Albania in that shoddy deal in which a 19-year old kid sold hundreds of millions of dollars of worthless ammunition to the war in Afghanistan. What’s even funnier is, the Albanian government had tried to give the exact same ammunition away for free at the start of the war.
But you wouldn’t know that, would you? It’s not like anyone is covering this or anything.
Previously:
The Dumbing Down of America
The Media Hates You, Part II
The Media Hates You, Part 10,000
The (U.S.) Media Hates You #4: Why Regular Americans Don’t Know What’s Going On
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust