More Honored in the Breach
Look. Even if your conception of "the news" is that it's a means of reporting to its consumers only the aberrant event, doesn't that mean you have some obligation to educate people as to what is the norm?

In Iraq, Big Media too often takes the easy way out. It simply runs with the most violent and chaotic images ---rarely turning to the other, more numerous events in that troubled country that would acquaint America with the stories of our successes among the Iraqi people.

This is what balance on the airwaves and newspapers means: reporting the political and cultural events in Iraq and analyzing them for the benefit of our own country. What is going on with a free press in Iraq? How about all of the new satellite dishes sprouting up? What are the Iraqis watching? What are they importing? What sorts of groups are they joining? What use are they making of the Internet?

There's a lot of stuff going on in Iraq's civil society ---and Big Media isn't doing enough to make the Iraqi people's struggle for peace and liberty relevant to us. Even if it takes the crassest sort of exploitative and ridiculous showmanship that America can muster, make it happen. Bring the Iraqi people ---not just the murderers and wacked-out Islamofascists--- into our homes and make their successes our own. This should be the big networks' bailiwick, but they have done jack.

I read somewhere today that Don Rumsfeld says that our Government does a lousy job of communicating the superiority of our ideas to the world. A "D or D-minus." It's an amazing thing for him to say, but I agree absolutely. I want the kind of propaganda that made America famous. I want for us to stand up in our own little ways and say to the world that our system is one that tends towards peace and freedom and opportunity. Those are inherently desirable states of being for any citizen in the world. In large measure, we realize those high standards ---and it is necessary that we remind our neighbors it is so.