Afghanistan coverage in US papers falls in 2011

Coverage of Afghanistan in American newspapers fell in 2011 compared to the previous year, according to a study from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Although coverage of international issues jumped by more than a third - due mainly to events connected to the Arab Spring - the percentage of articles written about Afghanistan fell from four per cent in 2010 to 1.9 per cent in 2011. Afghanistan fell from the fourth most covered issue to the sixth.
However, the biggest breaking news story of the year in the US was the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. That week, the story filled 69 per cent of all news stories studied in newspapers and online and time on television and radio news, making it the biggest weekly story for four years.
In terms of Blogs and Twitter, Afghanistan did not feature at all in the top ten stories, which were dominated by the Economy and Apple news on blogs and  news about Google and Twitter itself, on Twitter. The killing of bin Laden featued at the tenth biggest story on blogs, but did not feature on Twitter to any great degree.
The best international news coverage was offered by PBS Newshour, which offered a third more coverage than the media overall.