A stunning admission from the Sentinel's Ombudsman

When it come to Iraq, yeah we do report the negative.

Positive, negative make up same news picture
-Manning Pynn


Roy Harris of Orlando forwarded to me an e-mail message last week with photographs described as having been taken in Afghanistan and Iraq of soldiers with smiling children, petting a cat, huddled in prayer.

"I realize that since these reflect a positive view," he wrote, "they will never see the light of day in our negative press!!"

He's right, of course, on both points: The pictures are highly unlikely to appear in the Sentinel, and the press often does focus on the negative.

Karl Zinsmeister, whom President George W. Bush appointed last week as his top domestic policy adviser, also has complained about negativity in the press, particularly with regard to coverage of the Iraq War. As editor in chief of The American Enterprise, he wrote in August 2004, "Deadline pressure, sensationalism, and sometimes just laziness create a negative bias. The easiest reporting from a war zone is simply to point a camera at something that's on fire. A hundred counterparts that aren't in flames are 'not a story.' "

That negative focus is not confined to Iraq. You are far more likely to see a picture in the Sentinel of a house ablaze down the street than of another that didn't catch fire.

I don't think that can be attributed to negative bias so much as to news consisting of the unusual.

For that reason, although negative information can be tiresome and depressing, perhaps we should be glad the news contains so much of it. We would have real cause for concern if positive information became so rare that it dominated journalists' attention.

The pictures of soldiers in uplifting circumstances weren't excluded from news media because they weren't negative. Apart from being unable to verify the authenticity or details of random photographs that arrive on the Internet, journalists aren't risking their lives in the Middle East to make the public feel good about war. That's up to politicians.

They are there to keep readers informed about the prospect for peace -- and what it is costing, in terms of dollars and lives.

Unbelievable!