Media pushed aside Iraq war for Lebanon

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/15280171.htm

NEW YORK - Remember Iraq? Not much has changed with the war there, but it has largely been pushed off front pages and squeezed from television news shows by the conflict in Lebanon and, last week, by the terror arrests in London.

Experts are wondering whether Iraq will regain its prominence in the news if the truce between Israel and Hezbollah remains intact.

"It is one of the many dangers of covering Iraq and the one that we don't really talk about ... that Americans will lose interest," said Jane Arraf, a former CNN Baghdad bureau chief working as a press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations this year.

Barring major changes, Arraf suspects that the story won't have the prominence that it once had. Americans are becoming numb to the series of depressing images from Iraq, she said. The danger for journalists and the difficulty moving around in Iraq also makes it extremely difficult to tell stories about how people are coping.

But Iraq won't recede as a story the way the war against terrorism in Afghanistan did, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"I don't think Iraq disappears because it is the primary political problem defining the Bush administration and will influence the election," he said.

[Supersedeas]

1. there are all kind of political reasons for focusing on Israel & ignoring

Iraq

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. Wasn't just the media - George decided it was a good time for a holiday

.
.
.

Went to his pig farm for a week and a half and read a book

While thousands died and hundreds of thousands lost their homes in Lebanon

I ain't the only one that noticed . . . .