CBS: The View From Baghdad, The View From Home (Good news overlooked?)

One of the most common complaints of conservative media critics is that Americans don't hear enough good news from Iraq. Many blame ideological bias for the dearth of good news, arguing that journalists' political leanings keep them from sharing the truth. Liberals, meanwhile, have their own complaints: They say the media was too unquestioning of the administration in the run-up to the war and too close to the military during the invasion.

This argument usually plays out in the same, tired way, with ideologues arguing over questions of political bias. But reality — as is so often the case — is more complicated. To understand the nature of the news from Iraq, you have to drop the rhetoric and deal with specifics.

And that process goes through the critics who acknowledge that all of the media's problems don't begin and end with ideological bias. One such critic is Bret Stephens, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and former editor of the Jerusalem Post. "I would say that events in Iraq are better than they are commonly portrayed in the media," says Stephens. The primary reason, he says, isn't ideological bias, though that's a part of it. "The basic problem is the way news organizations assemble stories. You don't report on a dog that doesn't bite."

Because of the media's natural inclination to report bad news, he says, media consumers don't hear enough about positive developments in Iraq. They also don't realize the violence in Iraq is confined to a few areas — the ones where the reporters are. "A reporter wants to be where the action is, and the action is where the killing is. It's not where they're building schools," Stephens says. Reporting about Iraq only from Baghdad, he says, is like reporting about America from the South Bronx 15 years ago — "you're going to see a different reality than you would in the rest of the country."

Time magazine correspondent Michael Ware, who wrote this week's cover story on Iraq, sees the situation much differently. I spoke to him on Wednesday from Baghdad. "It would be dishonest and disingenuous to put a positive spin on Iraq," he says. "People have to queue for three hours just to fill their gas tanks. They only have a few hours of electricity a day. They're too scared to send their children to the schools that have been painted by American troops because they're afraid they'll be killed. The successes are swamped by the gruesome reality of life in Iraq."

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http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2005/09/29/publiceye/entry889779.shtml