When The News Is Good ....

As you can tell from the final example, there is reporting of positive developments from Iraq – though some might say that the media doesn't bother with them.

On last night's "Evening News," Lara Logan reported on the story of a US military patrol happening upon a "horrific" scene more than a week ago – 24 children being starved in a Baghdad orphanage, some tied to beds like dogs on a leash. As she reports:

"They saw multiple bodies laying on the floor of the facility," Staff Sgt. Mitchell Gibson of the 82nd Airborne Division told CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan. "They thought they were all dead, so they threw a basketball (to) try and get some attention, and actually one of the kids lifted up their head, tilted it over and just looked and then went back down. And they said, 'oh, they're alive' and so they went into the building."

Inside the building, a government-run orphanage for special needs children, the soldiers found more emaciated little bodies tied to the cribs. They had been kept this way for more than a month, according to the soldiers called in to rescue the 24 boys.

Seeing a boy who was at the orphanage, where Logan reported from, "with thousands of flies covering his body, unable to move any part of his body, you know we had to actually hold his head up and tilt his head to make sure that he was OK, and the only thing basically that was moving was his eyeballs," Gibson explained. "Flies in the mouth, in the eyes, in the nose, ears, eating all the open wounds from sleeping on the concrete."

All that, and the boy was laying in the boiling sun — temperatures of 120 degrees or so, according to Gibson.

Looking at the boy today, as he sits up in his crib without help, it is hard to believe he is the same boy, one week later — now clean and being cared for along with all the other boys in a different orphanage located only a few minutes away from where they suffered their ordeal.

In a sea of bad news about Iraq and the surge and rising body counts in the streets, the sad story provided an opportunity to show an accomplishment of the U.S. military presence in Baghdad.

Some would say that such stories should be aired each night, to counter the negative stats that pervade the news cycle. But as the brother and close friend of two soldiers who have been over there and (thankfully) returned, I continue to find the coverage of Iraq reasonable. While there may be occasional good news from inside Iraq, there is frequently a weightier bad news story the same day. And if there was an editorial meeting about covering soldiers dying due to an IED versus an uptick in the water supply outside Tikrit, I would find it insulting to a soldier who gave his or her life to the mission if we were to spend a minute talking about plumbing.

Logan's story was not merely about some impoverished children or some abuses of power, but the systematic starving and imprisoning of two dozen Iraqi children, all handicapped in one way or another. It was an atrocious crime and rescue that rose above the normal din of electricity access or children playing soccer in the streets.

Aside from answering the question "why did it take a week for this story to get reported," the story was a solid accounting of the scene. And while I'd like to say that the story ventured a tad into the touchy-feely cutesy realm, anybody who couldn't appreciate the sight of smiling kids clasping the hands of the Americans who helped them … well, there's no convincing them that this story was worth being told.