Via Seattle entrepreneur and blogger Martin Tobias comes a welcome tip. Some people gripe about skewed coverage of the effort to countermand Baathist hardliners and foreign jihadists pining for the Golden Age of Saddam. Meanwhile, other bloggers actually go to Iraq, to report firsthand. The latter group will soon include 35-year-old military veteran and software analyst Bill Roggio, formerly of Easongate fame. Roggio has spearheaded a group blog called The Fourth Rail, and is actually raising $25,000 to fund a trip to Iraq so he can blog the good news direct, in the war against the forces of darkness.

Even Stateside, less than two weeks before his departure, you can see what a difference a fair perspective makes. CNN headlines this story, "U.S. Marine Killed In Anbar Offensive," but in fact the very same article notes that 60 to 80 "insurgents" were slain in this important battle to establish control near the porous Syrian border with Iraq. Roggio weaves the CNN piece into a link-rich survey of the border security initiative, a post he titled "Day Three Of Steel Curtain." It packs a lot more context and balance than your average MSM report, while nonetheless employing conventional MSM and less-typical sources such as Army Times. Metro daily foreign editors in mid-size markets such as Seattle do this all the time, except with a somewhat different slant. Under the guise of balance they extract from three or four big print dailies the most damning pieces of different Iraq stories on a given day, and patch together a dog's breakfast of agenda-driven negativity in one "article."

With many other readers, I'll be looking forward to Roggio's dispatches from Iraq.

TECHNORATI TAGS: IRAQ, MEDIA, BLOGS

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 8, 2005 09:05 AM