Gee, why wonder why America’s news media producers and editors aren’t interested in stories out of Iraq any more?

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”

In a telephone interview last week, Ms. Logan said the CBS News bureau in Baghdad was “drastically downsized” in the spring. The network now keeps a producer in the country, making it less of a bureau and more of an office.

When the war in Iraq wasn’t going so well, and the situation looked grim, Iraq was the biggest story in America.  Every paper ran a story on it every day.  Every newscast features stories on it several times a week.

Now that war is going well in Iraq?  And the situation is looking optimistic, if not downright sunny?  Suddenly the story isn’t as important.

Which is baffling.  If the war is such an important issue that it warrants constant coverage when things are going poorly, shouldn’t it warrant similar coverage when things get better?

You’d think.  But, media bias aside, this is more evidence to show the tremendous amount of success we’ve had in Iraq.  All we have to do now is get Democrats - up to and including Barack Obama - to recognize it.