Despite having about 120-seconds’ worth of facts to report, the 24/7 news channels have devoted 1200 minutes to the carnage at Virgina Tech. CNN International has yielded the airwaves to its U.S. big brother, allowing viewers to witness improbably burnished anchors pepper dazed students with questions of staggering inanity. Meanwhile, camera-phone footage of the event is shown on an endless loop.

Although the killings are unarguably horrific, the excessive television coverage (an hour ago, BBC News 24, Sky News, and CNN all broadcast the “convocation” held at a campus basketball arena) has given some loser posthumous fame and turned the grief of a community into a global spectacle. More significantly, the approach to this tragedy throws into sharp relief how little the ongoing slaughter in Iraq now disturbs the news agenda.

According to a press release from Iraq Body Count (IBC), 26,540 Iraqi civilians were killed in the past year (20 March 2006 – 16 March 2006). This figure may well be an understatement as IBC’s total figure for the number of civilians killed since March 2003 is under 70,000–a fraction of the 654,965 fatality total estimated by a John Hopkins study.

But let us, for the moment, accept the IBC figure of 26,540. This figure is roughly equivalent to the total student body at Virginia Tech. Or, looked at other way, 26,540 breaks down to a rate of 73 civilians killed per day. That’s slightly more than two Virginia Tech “spree killings” per day, every day for the past 362 days.

Yet even that doesn’t quite capture the enormity of the barbarism unfolding in Iraq. As Iraq’s population of approximately 27 million is roughly 11 times smaller than the United States, the impact on the population at large is equivalent to 22 Virginia Tech massacres per day.

Yet the paucity of news coverage from Iraq is understandable. It’s an open-ended bad news story, with no sign of offering closure. And how many top news anchors can you persuade to report from downtown Baquba these days?