November 1, 2005 — Michael Massing, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, addressed concerns about reporting on the war in Iraq in a discussion titled “The Glaring Gap in the Press Coverage of Iraq.”
The author of Now They Tell Us, a collection of articles about press coverage on the war, Massing described how the mainstream media has fallen short in relaying the status of the reconstruction efforts in Iraq. As the nation debates whether American troops can be brought home, journalists, Massing says, must be unflagging in their duty to apprise the public of whether the situation can, indeed, be approached differently.
To do so, Massing suggested that journalists consult think tanks and the Pentagon more often while also covering counter-insurgencies and the internal politics of Iraq in greater depth.
