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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Philip Seib, a professor of journalism at Marquette University and author of the recent Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War and Broadcasts from the Blitz: How Edward R. Murrow Helped Lead America into War. Here, Seib writes that the "Evening News'" international coverage is narrow and incomplete and offers a suggestion to improve it. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.

After watching the CBS "Evening News" recently, I’ve come away dissatisfied with international coverage that is so terse and narrow that it raises more questions than it answers. I’ll make my complaints and then offer a suggestion.

If a principal role for the news media is to provide the public with the information needed to make a democracy work, then "Evening News" -- like other U.S. network newscasts -- is not doing its job in terms of international news. Reporting about Iraq is part of this and should be addressed first, since most nights that sad country constitutes all or almost all of the outside world as seen by CBS.

Apparently no one at CBS is asking the question that occurs to me after each of these stories: What does it mean? For instance, a Dec. 13 report discussed the idea of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Baghdad, and then noted that “Iraqis wouldn’t stand for” a big build-up of the American military presence. Why not? The story didn’t say.

The following night, another story about the same topic. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), in Iraq with a congressional delegation, called for an “overwhelming troop presence,” which has been taken to mean up to 35,000 more combat soldiers. Where would they come from? More call-ups of Reserve and National Guard soldiers? Redeployment of forces from elsewhere? Would there be an effort to expand enlistments and the overall size of the U.S. military? No direct answers. Presumably someone has some thoughts about this.

Then, at the end of its story, CBS reported that a year would be needed to recruit and train just 6,000 new troops. Put these items together and you have stunning evidence about how the Iraq commitment has crippled America’s ability to respond quickly to a new crisis in North Korea or elsewhere. Something about that needed to be in the story or, better yet, in a follow-up story addressing just that topic. But there was not a word.

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