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Finally, my friends, Katie Couric is coming to CBS. Rejoice! Now, I'm not expressing that sentiment because I'm excited about Couric's imminent arrival, though I am looking forward to watching the way her arrival reshapes CBS News. No, my reason for rejoicing is something else: I'm just thrilled that the world no longer has to endure the avalanche of will-she-or-won't-she stories that the press has thrown at us for the past few months.

Sure, we're now dealing with a fair share of post-announcement Couric stories, but they can't last all that long (can they?). And most of them are at least about something, issues like what the move means for CBS News and how it will affect the bottom line. Before the announcement, by contrast, we had to endure day after day of speculative pieces that didn't really move the story in a significant way. Katie wants to go! Katie wants to stay! CBS isn't offering enough money! The deal is done! The deal is stalled! Wait – it's back on again!

The whole thing had more than a faint whiff of high school, with the nerds – that would be the media critics – obsessing over the lives of the popular kids, chief among them Katie, the queen bee around whom the Matts and Dianes and Soledads revolve. I'm not trying to be too hard on the nerds here – they're my people, after all – but it seemed like they got so blinded by the Couric story, with its celebrity protagonist, that they forgot one of the primary rules of journalism: If a particular topic offers you nothing to write about, well then don't write about it.

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On Monday, a forum called "Iraq: Reports from the Frontlines" was held at UC Berkeley. "The discussion centered on two deeply polarizing questions," writes Bonnie Azab Powell in an excellent write-up (hat tip Romo). "Given the extreme danger of the situation in Iraq, are journalists in Iraq even able to cover the real story? And are they getting the story 'right'?"

This is ground we've covered before, but it continues, I think, to be extremely important. So let's get into it. The forum included a partial screening of "The War Tapes," which is a documentary filmed entirely by soldiers that will be released in theatres in July. The film is "the single best document you could see," says New York Times' Baghdad bureau chief John Burns. "It captures, in ways we as embedded reporters could not, the misery and futility of this war." It also captures the horror: At one point, writes Powell, "The camera pans slowly over the blackened shell of the vehicle and the charred upper torso of a man, head burned beyond recognition, lying halfway outside the open car door in a pool of blood. In numb tones, the soldier holding the camera tells us what that blood and flesh smells like and describes how crisped skin fragments are crunching under his feet."

When Washington Post writer Jackie Spinner told the audience that "I think we're getting 90 percent of the story" in Iraq, she was met with guffaws. "Excuse me, have you been there?," she replied. She said that Iraqi stringers help the Post's reporters get the stories that they otherwise could not.

Ralph Peters was not at the forum, but Spinner's point made me think of his latest dispatch from Baghdad. I really have no idea how true this is – Peters has a much rosier view of the situation in Iraq, to put it diplomatically, than most of the people covering it – but it is worth considering. Here's a portion:

The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.

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The debate about how much blame the media deserves for the "miscommunication" in West Virginia continues in earnest today, with a number of new outlets trying to explain their behavior.



Len Downie, executive editor of the The Washington Post, was defiant: "Our story was a reflection of what was being said at the time," he said. "I don't regard it as our error, but as an error by the people in charge of the rescue." CNN's Jonathan Klein also defended his outlet, saying the story was tied to "two pretty good sources" – West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin and and West Virginia Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. (Nightline executive producer James Goldston said something similar.) John Robinson, editor of the News & Record of Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote that "we regret" that "the story on the front page was tragically, tragically wrong," but he took issue with Greg Mitchell's characterization of the media's performance as "disturbing and disgraceful." (Mitchell later deleted the word "disgraceful" from the piece.)

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