Afghanistan Tops the Week's News

Amid signs of disagreement over war strategy within the Obama administration, Afghanistan led the news last week, the first time since the News Coverage Index began in January 2007 that the eight-year-old war has emerged as the top story. From October 5-11, Afghanistan accounted for 20% of the newshole, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That doubled the previous high-water mark for coverage. Last week's coverage seems to put to rest emphatically the sense of Afghanistan as a low-level conflict occurring largely out of public view. The shift in media emphasis may signal that the war, and the impending Obama decision on how to prosecute it, will attract the kind of press attention that accompanied the domestic debate over Iraq strategy several years ago. Afghanistan was primarily a television story last week. It filled 30% of the airtime studied on network news and 25% on cable news.