Media Coverage of Iraq

Are the media ignoring good news out of Iraq?  Perhaps.  That's the theme of a some recent columns, one of which evidently has gotten a St. Paul Pioneer Press assistant editor in big trouble.  You can read about that story here (hat tip to Powerline), and then one of our excellent Northern students who in an Iraq vet wrote a piece for the American News recently.  This theme also comes up in Karl Zinmeister's excellent Dawn Over Baghdad.  Zinmeister suggests a few reasons why we get so little good news from Iraq.  I think the basic reason is that the reporters aren't willing to really hunt down stories.  Reporters rarely leave their hotel to do any reporting.  All they do is sit around, wait until something blows up, run over there and take a body count, and then "Whammy!" you have a story.  But to report on the opening of schools and hospitals or the connection of towns to clean water and electricity requires leaving Baghdad, doing scores of interviews, and lots of time.  The body count stories are just so much easier.  I don't mean to dismiss the deaths occurring in Iraq, of course, but simply wish more good news was reported.  Another student here who spent a year in Iraq was asked if he follows the news from Iraq since he's been back, and he said he doesn't because it bears so little similarity to what he experienced.  I think his exact words were, "There is so much good happening there."  How about letting us back home learn about the good that is going on "over there"?