The Good News Is, the Good News May Get Reported

[darrels joy]

The Good News Is, the Good News May Get Reported
A heartening piece of metajournalism appeared in yesterday's New York Times. It seems the Associated Press has come under pressure from American editors about the negativity of its coverage from Iraq. Rosemary Goudreau, editorial page editor of the Tampa Tribune, received numerous copies of a mass e-mail listing accomplishments in Iraq, and this prompted her to contact the AP:

Ms. Goudreau's newspaper, like most dailies in America, relies largely on The Associated Press for its coverage of the Iraq war. So she finally forwarded the e-mail message to Mike Silverman, managing editor of The A.P., asking if there was a way to check these assertions and to put them into context. Like many other journalists, Mr. Silverman had also received a copy of the message.

Ms. Goudreau's query prompted an unusual discussion last month in New York at a regular meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of The Associated Press. Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the daily death tolls.

"The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question.

"It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place," she said. "But there's a perception that we're not telling the whole story."

The fault here, though, does not lie entirely with the AP. Silverman says he researched the e-mail and found that in the Times' words, "most of the information in the anonymous e-mail message had been reported by The A.P., but the details had been buried in articles or the articles had been overlooked." The Times piece concludes by noting that Goudreau conceded that by the end of the meeting, "editors were acknowledging that even in their own hometowns, 'we're more likely to focus on people who are killed than on the positive news out of a school.' "

And indeed, here's an AP Baghdad dispatch that moved yesterday on the AP wire:

The capital's Sadr City section was once a hotbed of Shiite Muslim unrest, but it has become one of the brightest successes for the U.S. security effort.

So far this year, there has been only one car bombing in the neighborhood, and only one American soldier has been killed.

A year ago, militiamen garbed in black and armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades roamed the streets in open revolt against the American presence. But U.S. troops quelled the uprising, and today calmly patrol the district, aided by loyalists of the radical cleric who spurred the violence.

A Google News search--which is wide-ranging but not comprehensive--turned up only two newspapers that have published the Sadr City story: the Chicago Sun-Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The story is not terribly time-sensitive, so let us hope that other papers will pick it up.

One additional bit of context: It was in Sadr City that Casey Sheehan was killed in action in April 2004. America's success there is further evidence that he did not die in vain.