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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the past few months, American media have done what they rarely do.

Focus on events beyond our shores.

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Japan.

But this week, our national attention returned to battles over budget-cutting,

berthers, and Donald Trump.

The appetite for overseas stories appears to have dried up. Mark Jerkowitz

at the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism says that a few weeks back,

Libya and Japan made up more than 40 percent of the news, an extraordinary number. But now,

even as fresh horrors rained down on the people of Libya and Japan, the

American media look elsewhere for leads. Perhaps, says Jerkowitz, that's because events out there

have become both more complicated and less new, a lethal combination for coverage. In a strange way,

there's kind of a new normal with both of those

crises. There was this real explosion of Libyan coverage. But after a while, it became apparent

that this is now a grinding civil war that wasn't going to be resolved as I think some of the

news media thought as soon as the NATO planes started bombing, it's almost gruesome to

say it's settled into a plateau when civilians are being indiscriminately shelled and there's so much

...