* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its annual "State of the News Media", looking at the American news industry and its coverage of a huge variety of subject matter. The full report is a whopping 180,000 words, but if you want a quick in, the niftiest highlight I've found so far is an interactive tool for looking at US media coverage, which allows you to make quick graphs like this one below comparing American news coverage for all outlets of some top foreign conflict stories in 2009.
It's no shocker that Afghanistan came out on top. But it is somewhat surprising that coverage of Iran doubled that of Israel/Palestine, in what was a big year for both topics. The results are based on analysis of close to 70,000 stories in the mainstream media.
