Afghanistan: US press withdraws

[unhappycamper]

Afghanistan: US press withdraws
By Ben Schreiner
Jan 6, 2012

Lost amid the attention paid to the historic United States withdrawal from Iraq has been the fact that nearly 100,000 US troops (and a near equal number of private contractors) remain entrenched in Afghanistan. The 10-year-long war has indeed become what many in the US have deemed the "forgotten war". For just as American troops have withdrawn from Iraq, the American press has largely packed up and withdrawn from Afghanistan.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, coverage of the war in Afghanistan accounted for only 2% of all US press content in 2011.[1] That's down two points from 2010, and three points from 2009. To put this in context, American media coverage of Afghanistan was on par with that of sports in the last year, and only one percent greater than the coverage of celebrity and entertainment related news.

Declining US press coverage of the war has no doubt been hastened by withering resources devoted by major American media outlets to Afghanistan. According to the online press-watch organization, Nieman Watchdog, only five US newspapers now maintain bureaus in Afghanistan, while at any given time a maximum of only ten broadcast correspondents can be found in the country. [2]

~snip~

Such explanations from the American media establishment, however, fail to illuminate the underlying reason behind the shortcomings of US press coverage of the war in Afghanistan. For the decay in coverage is attributable to a problem greater than that of a press corps prioritizing perceived audience preferences to the detriment of news. Instead, the main factor in the decline in war coverage is a systemic failure of the American press brought about by the internalization of an US imperial ideology.


http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NA06Df01.html

[99th_Monkey]

1. Afghanistan was just the stop-over point, the stepping stone

to Iran.

Gee .. we were just in the neighborhood and thought we'd drop in,
and bomb the shit out of you Iran, give up those Nukes, or else.

We gottum, and you don't ...
nya, nya, nya-nya-nya.. :p

[Robb]

2. We don't need to pay for newspapers! News should be free!

Journalists don't need a living wage! We can rely on bloggers to bring us the REAL news!

...Oh. How much is that ticket to Kabul?