And in the 1990s, CNN actually booked a steady, daily, 10-minute satellite feed from Jerusalem that guaranteed news from the region would reach the network's Atlanta headquarters. At the same time, the Middle East had lost its cachet as an obsession of the U.S. government. Instead, the U.S. government was focused on China, the Balkans, and Russia. Even places like Somalia and East Timor seemed to arouse more interest in the United States than the forever-droning conflict in the Middle East. This is not to diminish in any way the tireless efforts of the small team of respected and talented American diplomats who have devoted their careers to working on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Competition is tough.
And the Middle East conflict, about which American viewers and readers had heard so much, now faced stiff competition for diminished space being devoted in the media to international stories. It may be interesting to observe whether the new administration in Washington handles the Middle East with more or less prominence than the Clinton team did. In the last decade, trends within the news media themselves reinforced sketchy coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Throughout the 1990s, especially in the United States, the prevalence of the TV remote control, the widespread distribution of computers, and by 1996, the Internet, as well as the proliferation of news outlets, drove Americans to an attention-span deficit that simply excludes understanding much of the Middle East thicket. This is not a minor or ephemeral phenomenon.