For the fourth straight year, Iraq dominated foreign affairs coverage by the three major U.S. commercial television network evening news broadcasts during 2006, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

Last summer"s conflict between Israel and Hezbollah got second billing, just ahead of coverage of events related to the "global war on terror", including the largely domestic controversy over U.S. interrogation tactics against terrorist suspects.

Iraq-related stories accounted for about 15 percent of the 14,512 minutes of news broadcast by ABC, CBS, and NBC during the year -- roughly the same percentage as in 2005. Total Iraq-related coverage came to 2,009 minutes.

Other foreign news events that made the top 20 most heavily covered stories of the year garnered considerably less attention. The Arab-Hezbollah conflict received 578 minutes of coverage, while North Korea"s missile and nuclear weapons tests claimed 162 minutes, and Iran"s nuclear programme another 131 minutes of broadcast time by the three networks.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the power struggle between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian territories together received a total of 121 minutes, while the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan rated only 83 minutes over the year, according to the report.

"International affairs was seen virtually exclusively through the prism of war and terrorism last year," said Andrew Tyndall, the report"s founder and editor. "Development stories just didn"t make it; it was all violence."

An estimated 23 million U.S. residents watch the 22 minutes of evening news the three networks broadcast on an average weekday evening. Although cable news -- including CNN, Fox News and MSNBC -- have made important gains in the number of viewers who watch them, the audience for the network news is still roughly 10 times larger.

Polls show that most of the U.S. public relies primarily on television, as opposed to newspapers, magazines or radio, for most of their information about national and international news.

Of the 20 top news stories, according to Tyndall, four were directly related to Iraq. The largest by far was U.S.-led combat stories, which rose from 879 minutes in 2005 to 1,131 minutes in 2006, or more than half of all Iraq coverage.

Other major Iraq-related stories included the rise in sectarian violence since last February (187 minutes), attacks on war-zone journalists (170 minutes), and the fate of former President Saddam Hussein, whose execution just last Saturday garnered considerable attention here, and his Baath Party (92 minutes).

Most datelines on Iraq-related stories were from Washington, particularly from the White House and the Pentagon, rather than from Iraq itself. Indeed, only about 15 percent of total network news coverage was reported from foreign countries.

"When the stories originate from Washington, the frames will almost certainly be dominated by official sources," according to William Dorman, professor of government and journalism at California State University in Sacramento. "That may explain why the mainstream press has been so late in recognising the transformation of the conflict in Iraq from an insurgency against the occupation to a civil war."

The year"s second-ranking story -- the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah -- marked a sharp rise in attention to the Jewish state compared to the last several years. The last time Israel ranked at the top of the news was during the height of the second Palestinian intifada when that conflict claimed nearly 1,000 minutes of coverage by the three networks. That fell to 284 minutes in 2003 and 120 minutes to 2004 before rising modestly to 145 minutes in 2005.

Several stories related to the "global war on terror" garnered almost as much attention as Israel"s conflicts with its neighbours. Some 229 minutes of coverage was devoted to Congress"s and the administration"s compliance with the recommendations of the September 11 Commission; 144 minutes to the debate over the treatment of terrorist suspects; and another 99, 97, and 70 minutes, respectively, to airlines" anti-terrorism efforts, global efforts to fight terrorism, and the transfer of al Qaeda suspects from secret detention by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Guantanamo.

The overall dominance of Iraq, other Middle East conflicts, and the "war on terror" in foreign coverage -- to the virtual exclusion of other overseas issues and events, such as the rise of China as a great power or global warming -- would appear to reinforce a major mantra of President George W. Bush, repeated on New Year"s Day, that "defeating terrorists and extremists is the challenge of our time."

"The most striking thing about the list is how much the news agenda is shaped by the "war on terror"," according to Jim Naureckas, an analyst at the New York-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

"Stories almost need to have a "clash of civilisations" angle to get substantial coverage. Just as during the Cold War, issues were either viewed through the prism of the U.S./Soviet conflict or ignored," he said. "Stories that don"t lend themselves to this kind of treatment -- like global climate change, or the three million AIDS deaths in 2006 -- have a hard time getting heard."

Indeed, aside from North Korea"s acts of defiance and Bush"s trip to Vietnam in November, Asia was practically invisible on U.S. network news last year, as was Latin America. In Africa, the dominant story was the violence, which Bush himself has called a "genocide", in and around the Darfur region of Sudan which garnered a combined total of 59 minutes from the three networks.

That was nonetheless three times the coverage Darfur received in 2005, an advance that, according to Tyndall, was due in part to the visits of Hollywood and other celebrities, ranging from Bono to George Clooney.

Tyndall also credited former Vice President Al Gore and his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" for bringing global warming onto the network news agenda this year, if only for 47 minutes, the same amount of time devoted to the global controversy created by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

Other major stories among the top 20 had foreign aspects to them. The debate over illegal immigration and the imposition of new controls along the Mexican border claimed a total of 266 minutes, putting it in fourth place overall, while the rise in oil and gas prices claimed another 207 minutes. The controversy over the lease of major U.S. ports to a Dubai-based company garnered 90 minutes.

Among domestic stories, coverage of the November mid-term elections (375 minutes) and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (367 minutes) topped the list.

Last January"s lethal coal mine explosion in West Virginia ranked third with 132 minutes while the auto industry"s financial problems claimed another 100 minutes, one minute more than the scandal surrounding a former Republican congressman"s sexually explicit email messages to teenaged Congressional pages.