US TV News Ops Shamefully Neglect World News, Americans Don't Seem to Care

This is why most of this nation lives in a vacuum and knows nothing about what's going on.

Most Americans can't find the Middle East on a map, but they're happy to have them filling their tanks. And that's the problem with America and Americans. And I say that as one of them, though I do try to keep up using other sources like Mother Beeb and the various blogs I read daily. They're not all Defamer and Gawker, you know.

But keep trampling shoppers and Christmas and shooting guns into the air at New Year's, America. Sure, go right ahead. And keep eating and drinking too much and slappin' the wife around tomorrow during the great American spectator event, watching oversized humans grunt, groan and play at a game that works like war.

Which is all fine (except the wife slappin' of course) but does it do more harm than the pleasure it brings? Because that's a conversation I think it's time to have.

Variety:

According to year-end review by the Tyndall Report, which monitors network news, coverage of foreign policy on the Big Three's nightly newscasts in 2008 hit a 21-year low, while Iraq coverage totaled 434 minutes, down from 1,888 in 2007 and a high of 4,162 in 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion.

That dearth in coverage has happened as networks have drawn down staffing at international bureaus. (On the print side, according to a 2008 Pew Research Center Study, nearly two thirds of American newspapers have cut back on foreign coverage.)

That report from Tyndall at this link.

Pew report at this link.

Thing is, most of the country doesn't really care. D'ya think they're too busy to notice or is it that they just can't conceive of why something happening far away would affect them?