News of the bombing that felled a CBS news crew washed over Baghdad's tight-knit press corps like a tempest this week -- evoking waves of anxiety, sadness, resolve and more than a little dismay.
American television journalists covering Iraq confronted the difficult reality that it took the deaths of a cameraman and soundman and critical injuries to correspondent Kimberly Dozier to help push Iraq back to the forefront of the nightly news back home.
By the end of April, the amount of time devoted to Iraq on the weeknight newscasts of the three major television networks had dropped nearly 60% from 2003, according to the independent Tyndall Report tracking service.
Even before Monday's attack in a relatively placid section of Baghdad, some network television correspondents had reached the unsettling conclusion that, even as they were risking their lives in the war zone, audiences and producers in America had grown weary of much of the coverage from Iraq.
ABC correspondent John Berman in Baghdad wrote in his blog recently that he and his colleagues felt like the castaways on the network's prime-time drama "Lost" -- "We have come to the conclusion that no one knows we are here."
Earlier, he wrote: "There is definitely a sense that the public feels like it knows what is going on here, and doesn't want to hear anymore about it."
One NBC veteran expressed frustration at the current verities of the nightly news -- the demand for ever more vivid storytelling to help combat audience fatigue, an imperative often thwarted by the relentless violence in Iraq that makes reporting so difficult.
"I think we are all very concerned that the war and Iraq are not getting their due," said Allen Pizzey, who has covered several wars, including Iraq, in 26 years at CBS News.
After the death and injury to his friends this week, Pizzey, who recently rotated out of Baghdad, added, "You think, 'What the hell are we out there for?' "
Network news executives defend their coverage. NBC News President Steve Capus said the network's coverage was "extensive," giving "an accurate depiction of what's going on over there."
Still, he acknowledged that the danger made the broadest reporting from the war zone problematic -- as evidenced by the attack that killed the CBS camera crew.
As a result, Capus has ordered his reporters to take a break from most assignments with the military, to give the network time to "pause to reassess" its safety precautions.
