The recent protests in Egypt have been recorded as the “biggest international story in a single week” in the past four years by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index.

According to the Pew report the stories accounted for 20 per cent of the ‘newshole’ – the space devoted to each subject in print and online and time on radio and TV – from 24 to 30 January and then 56 per cent from 31 January to 6 February . This went beyond any coverage of the Iraq war, the Haiti earthquake and the conflict in Afghanistan, the report adds.

One reason for the extraordinary level of coverage thus far has been journalists’ access to the scenes of protests and violence in Egypt that they have transmitted to US news audiences. That has been borne out by this finding from the News Coverage Index: In the past two weeks―from January 24-February 6―almost half (45 per cent) of all the stories about the unrest studied by PEJ have been reported directly from Egypt and neighboring countries.