Bad News, Too Often Traveling First Class?

Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, says it's "a little hard to focus on positive stories when 10 men have just been blown up or bombs are going off every day. I think we do a pretty good job of balancing it."

The paper has written about schools opening and increased local commerce, Miller says, but "we get untold grief from readers if we don't put American deaths on the front page, which we don't do every time. We go out with the troops and we listen to the troops. When the troops are positive, we write it. When the troops are negative, we write it. . . . It's not like we blithely run out and look for bad news."

Iraqis who kill civilians also have a media strategy, says Time's Ware. "Terrorism by its very nature is a form of warfare in which the battle is for headlines," he says. "The insurgents know just the kind of things to do to garner publicity. But in the end, it's those events that dominate life here in Iraq and dominate the story."

Administration officials don't help their case when they are slow in providing the facts. As NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported last week, the military initially said that 10 Marines killed outside Fallujah were on routine foot patrol but later revealed they had held a risky outdoor promotion ceremony.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita blames the "fog of war," saying, "The first reports are very often wrong." He says fuller coverage is "a two-way street. We're putting out a lot of information. We can always do better."

Rumsfeld cited as a positive development the emergence of "a vital and engaged media . . . with some 100 newspapers in Iraq now." He did not mention the Los Angeles Times disclosure that the Pentagon has paid some of those papers to carry positive stories written by military officers.

When Vice President Cheney says, as he did in June, that the insurgency is in its "last throes," journalists naturally start to wonder whether the administration officials are being candid. "As a balance to overly negative media coverage," Lowry says, "they give us overly positive statements."

The Miller Fallout

The wounds at the New York Times over the Judith Miller controversy still run deep.

Miller tells New Yorker writer Ken Auletta that she had threatened to sue her executive editor, Bill Keller, and the paper for defamation if Keller did not retract his comment questioning her "entanglement" with indicted former White House aide Scooter Libby. A Keller letter, saying he did not mean to suggest an improper relationship, paved the way for Miller's resignation last month.

Keller, for his part, says that when he was reviewing erroneous pieces on whether Iraq possessed illegal weapons, Miller "was defensive, unrelentingly sure of her positions and unwilling to be perceived as someone who wrote 'bad stories.' "

Miller insists that former executive editor Howell Raines "knew all of my sources" on the WMD stories, but Raines says he did not know and, "to my regret," never asked.

The Auletta article reveals bad blood between Keller and Raines, who beat Keller out for the top job in 2001 but was later forced out in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair fabrication scandal.

"Of all the things Howell bequeathed to me, somewhere high on that list -- maybe higher than Judy Miller -- is his claim that the newsroom had become fat and complacent," Keller says. "That plays into what business sides of newspapers tend to believe. I think that was wrong. . . . I don't think he really believed it. I think he thought it would make him popular on the business side. . . . Howell campaigned for the job with the political skills we admire in Karl Rove."

Raines responds: "It was well known throughout the paper that I believed the Times needed to improve its journalism and its business practices. . . . Any reasonable person who read my editorial page could see that I did not pander to business or economic interests. . . . Bill knows that the cynicism, if any, ran the other way." Raines adds that former editor Joe Lelyveld "tried to cast me as a candidate of the business side in hopes of improving Bill's standing in the newsroom."

These folks sure play hardball.

Dissing Dowd

Maureen Dowd was surprised -- make that "completely astounded" -- that the New York Times Book Review picked author Kathryn Harrison to write about Dowd's book "Are Men Necessary?" After all, Dowd had called Harrison "creepy" in her Times column in 1997, in reference to her book about a four-year consensual love affair with her father, and "vengeful" in another column.

"I have the right that every other author has, not to have the review assigned to someone whose book you've slammed," Dowd says.

Asked about Harrison's somewhat negative review, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis says Review editors knew Dowd had made "passing negative references" to the Harrison book, and these were "quite tame" compared with those of some critics. "The editors were confident Ms. Harrison would review Ms. Dowd's book fairly, and her review justified that confidence."