If people outside the United States are looking for answers why Americans often seem so clueless about the world outside their borders, they could start with what the three major U.S. television networks offered their viewers in the way of news during 2013.<\/p>\n
Syria and celebrities dominated foreign coverage by ABC, NBC, and CBS \u2013 whose combined evening news broadcasts are the single most important media source of information about national and international events for most Americans. Vast portions of the globe went almost entirely ignored, according to the latest annual review<\/a> by the authoritative Tyndall Report.<\/p>\n Latin America, most of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia apart from Afghanistan, and virtually all of East Asia \u2013 despite growing tensions between China and Washington\u2019s closest regional ally, Japan \u2013 were virtually absent from weeknight news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS last year, according to the report, which has tracked the three networks\u2019 evening news coverage continuously since 1988.<\/p>\n Out of nearly 15,000 minutes of Monday-through-Friday evening news coverage by the three networks, the Syrian civil war and the debate over possible U.S. intervention claimed 519 minutes, or about 3.5 percent of total air time, according to the report.<\/p>\n That made the Syrian conflict and the U.S. policy response the year\u2019s single-most-covered event. It was followed by coverage of the terrorist bombing by two Chechnya-born brothers that killed three people at the finish line of last April\u2019s Boston Marathon (432 minutes); the debate over the federal budget (405 minutes); and the flawed rollout of the healthcare reform law, or Obamacare (338 minutes).<\/p>\n The next biggest international story was the death in December of former South African President Nelson Mandela (186 minutes); the July ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and its aftermath; the coverage of Pope Francis I (157 minutes, not including an additional 121 minutes devoted to Pope Benedict\u2019s retirement and the Cardinals\u2019 conclave that resulted in Francis\u2019 succession); and the birth of Prince George, the latest addition to the British royal family (131 minutes).<\/p>\n The continued fighting in Afghanistan came in just behind the new prince at 121 minutes for the entire year.<\/p>\n The strong showings by the papal succession, Mandela\u2019s death, and Prince George\u2019s birth all demonstrated the rise of \u201ccelebrity journalism\u201d in news coverage, Andrew Tyndall, the report\u2019s publisher, told IPS. He added that \u201ca minor celebrity like Oscar Pistorius (the South African so-called \u201cBladerunner\u201d track star accused of murdering his girlfriend) attracted more coverage [by the TV networks \u2013 51 minutes] than all the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in the [11] months before Mandela\u2019s death.\u201d<\/p>\n Surveys by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, among other polling and research groups, show that about two-thirds of the general public cite television as their main source for national and international news, more than twice the number of people who rely on newspapers, and about one-third more than the growing number of individuals whose primary source is the internet.<\/p>\n An average of about 21 million U.S. residents watch the network news on any given evening. While the cable news channels \u2013 CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC \u2013 often get more public attention, their audience is actually many times smaller, according to media-watchers.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2012, more than four times as many people watched the three network newscasts than watched the highest-rated show on the three cable channels during prime time,\u201d Emily Guskin, a research analyst for the Pew Research Centre\u2019s Journalism Project, told IPS.<\/p>\n As in other recent years, news about the weather \u2013 especially its extremes and the damage they wrought \u2013 received a lot of attention on the network news, although, also consistent with past performance, the possible relationship between extreme weather and climate change was rarely, if ever, drawn by reporters or anchors.<\/p>\n Last year\u2019s tornado season, severe winter weather, drought and wild forest fires in the western states constituted three of the top six stories of the year, according to the report. Along with the aftermath of 2012\u2019s Superstorm Sandy, those four topics reaped nearly 900 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about six percent of the entire year\u2019s coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cA major flaw in the television news journalism is its inability to translate anecdotes of extreme weather into the overarching concept of climate change,\u201d noted Tyndall. \u201cAs long as these events are presented as meteorological and not climatic, then they will be covered as local and domestic, not global.<\/p>\n \u201cAn exception in 2013 was Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines,\u201d he noted. That event captured 83 minutes of coverage among the three networks, making it the single biggest story by far out of Asia for the year.<\/p>\n By comparison, the growing tensions between Japan and China in the East China Sea \u2013 which many foreign-policy analysts here rate as one of the most alarming events of the past year if, for no other reason, than the U.S. is committed by treaty to militarily defend Japan\u2019s territory \u2013 received a mere eight minutes of coverage.<\/p>\n Two other major U.S. foreign policy challenges received more coverage. North Korea and the volatile tenure of its young leader, Kim Jong-un, received a total of 87 minutes, including 10 minutes to visiting basketball veteran Dennis Rodman, of coverage during 2013.<\/p>\n Events in Iran, including the election of President Hassan Rouhani and negotiations over its nuclear programme, received a total of 104 minutes of coverage between the three networks over the course of the year, nearly as much attention as was given the British royals.<\/p>\n Libya received 64 minutes of coverage, but virtually all of it was devoted to the domestic controversy over responsibility for the September 2012 killings of the U.S. ambassador and three other officials there. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and the civil war and humanitarian disaster in the Central African Republic received no coverage at all.<\/p>\n As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict which Secretary of State John Kerry has made a top priority along with a nuclear deal with Iran, it received only 16 minutes of coverage in 2013. \u201cPalestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda,\u201d noted Tyndall.<\/p>\n As has Latin America, which received virtually no attention, according to Tyndall who suggested that the lack of coverage may be due to the growth of Spanish-language networks here. \u201cThe assumption seems to be that anyone interested in Latin American coverage would likely speak Spanish and find it in that language.\u201d<\/p>\n Altogether, the three networks devoted just under 4,000 minutes, or about 27 percent of total air time, to coverage of overseas stories or U.S. foreign policy. That was somewhat under the average amount of 25-year average. Indeed, the 1,302 minutes\u2019 worth of stories focused on U.S. foreign policy marked a nearly 50-percent reduction from the average.<\/p>\n \u201cIn general, foreign policy coverage has risen when the president is bellicose,\u201d according to Tyndall, who noted that such coverage had risen sharply as a result of armed conflicts during the administrations of the two Presidents Bush and fallen under Presidents Clinton and Obama.<\/p>\n But the collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) of \u201cmetadata\u201d on U.S. citizens and of private conversations and email of foreign leaders as disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden \u2013 a story with both domestic and international repercussions \u2013 also placed among the top 10 stories of the year with 210 minutes of coverage.<\/p>\n _____________________<\/p>\n Jim Lobe\u2019s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at <\/i>Lobelog.com<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n