News of Iraq and Afghanistan falling out of favour with American audiences

An interesting article in the New York Times today explains how the American Tv networks have scaled back their coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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.)

On top of that the networks can no longer justify keeping full time bureaus and are scaling back staffing levels and cannot compete for airtime with the presidential primaries.