The American press has been unhappy about the war in Iraq for a very long time. As a matter of fact, some mainstream American papers were calling the war a "quagmire" on Day 3.

I don't think that anyone who stops and thinks about it for any length of time can escape the conclusion that the press is sending us nothing but the bad news from Iraq. My husband expressed similar frustrations about Vietnam -- when he'd see media reports on the fighting, he had trouble believing they were reporting on the same campaign he'd just been involved in.

I feel a bit the same way about the evening news here in Philadelphia. In any given 24-hour period some 25 people die or are wounded as the result of fire, violent crime, or automobile accidents. A very scary place, this metro area, one would think. No one is reminding us about the other five million people who lived their ordinary lives with nothing amiss. Or the team of middle school students who just kicked butt at an international robotics competition in Japan.

I'm not suggesting that everything is perfect in Philadelphia -- or in Afghanistan or Iraq. And clearly, we still have a long way to go in Iraq. But I have to say that every time I read a bad news story about the war that's unalloyed bad news -- and then a good news story that shifts rapidly to "yes, but," and goes on to become a bad news story, I find myself wondering just what kind of editorial judgment is at work here.

I read three papers regularly (I didn't mention one in another comment to poliphilo earlier today. One is the Wall Street Journal. Another is the Philadelphia Inquirer, which this morning used the disaster of Hurricane Katrina as a teaser for an editorial about the shameful lack of a national health care system. The third is the Philadelphia Tribune, a long-established African American newspaper. It's quite enlightening to read about the same events from three such divergent perspectives.