A study was conducted to explore the way network television news observes three countries friendly to the United States: Australia, Canada, and Japan. Every news story from 1968 to 1983 on the ABC, CBS, and NBC networks that mentioned any of the three countries or their people was examined. Coders classified the 4,038 stories based on origin, date, length, network broadcast technique, and topic category. The most significant finding of the study was that none of the countries was particularly newsworthy. Most of the stories originated in the United States. The Canadian and Japanese stories tended to concern legal and political or business and economic matters, insofar as these impinged on American interests. Canadian stories were often concerned with the Canadian environment, but seldom with Canadian sports. Stories were unusually interested in Australian sports and environment. In general, the news reports tended to ignore art, music, show business, and religion, particularly in Canada. (HTH)