Hightower Lowdown

Ho-hum. The war. Such a bore. After six years, the media is fatigued with the story. As a CBS news producer put it, "One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in uniform." Yeah, so why cover that?

And, indeed, America's three big TV networks have quietly been executing their own staged withdrawal from Iraq. The evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC--where the great majority of Americans still say they get their "news"--have whacked their coverage of Bush's ongoing disaster in the desert. In the first half of this year, the total time devoted to Iraq by all three networks was only 181 minutes--out of approximately 11,000 minutes of available airtime.

Is nothing going on over there? No, nothing's happening--unless you count the constant deaths and horrendous casualties among U.S. troops, the expenditure of $3 billion in our tax dollars every week, the endless deaths of Iraqi civilians, the waste of our country's integrity and reputation, the everyday arrogance among America's corporate mercenaries, the collapse of civil society and bitter sectarian divides, Big Oil's move to grab Iraq's reserves of crude, and the administration's ceaseless use of censorship, propaganda, and lies to control the news from Iraq.

Gosh, you'd think that enterprising journalists might pull a story or two a day out of that soup. But doing so would require--whatdoyoucallems? Oh, yeah, reporters. CBS, however, no longer keeps even one full-time reporter on the Iraq beat. Meanwhile, none of the networks has a full-time reporter in Afghanistan.

Cover the war? That's too expensive--and it's not nearly as fun or profitable as a sitcom.