No news is bad news
: In a smart instant essay, Jay Rosen cautions that we shouldn’t fall into the why-does-the-press-report-only-bad-news trap in judging coverage of Iraq (inspired by the USA Today survey of Baghdad correspondents’ weltanschauungs, linked here). He’s right, of course. That stinky herring always haunts the news business. And we should ignore it. It’s our job to report bad news when the news is bad.
But the question about Iraqi coverage is not whether the coverage is too negative or too positive but whether the picture is accurate; that’s the issue. Do reporters have on their Kosovo (read: liberation) or their Vietnam (read: quagmire) glasses? The answer is as loaded as Charlton Heston’s closet.
And Rosen asks another good question that’s all about seeing the bigger problems to cover, the deeper story, the harder questions:
Maybe the complaint is not with covering the problems; it
