The one think the mainstream press will never acknowledge is their bias; they cannot come to grips with the significance of their own agendas at the expense of the truth. Their believers are dwindling to preoccupied soccer moms and dads, couch potatoes... and the converted (liberals).

WTF?? The Times spent only $1M last year on its entire Iraqi operations?! That's chump change.

Put another way, that's the fully-loaded annual cost of maybe 5 or 6 professionals for any Fortune 2000 corporation. Most venture-backed startups burn through costs like that every month.

If Jill Abramson truly thinks that this piddling sum represents a barrier to entry in her business, she needs to have a chat with her bankers. The blogosphere will inevitably develop a business model that will allow aggregations, and editing of, original scoops by locally-based bloggers that will one day put her own hacks to shame. Cash is the least of the MSM's advantages.

Before your trash the Times too much, you have to give credit to Times reporter Dexter Filkins. His battle coverage has been amazing.

I thought that it was 1LT Prakash? I would welcome his promotion, of course.

We've seen the results of his platoon leadership. Give the man a company and let him really get to work.

You're correct, I promoted him. Too bad I can't make it official.

Greyhawk - I read you everyday, just so you know. I also have a problem with AP. In fact I gave up part of my Christmas holiday to send an open letter to the board of AP and what management staff I could get addresses for. (Copy on my blog) I e-mailed a total of 23 people and snail mailed another 14. I did not get even one reply. I find it hard to accept that out of all that not one AP rep was interested in what a reader had to say. I guess readership is not one of AP's priorities.

Sir, I must protest! I feel very strongly the Al Rueters coverage of the "freedom fighters" has been superlative. AP's protrayals, while sympathetic and complimentary, do not reach the plateau of sychophancy and fawning servility demonstrated consistently by Al Reuters. I would place AP's coverage as only as pro-"militant" as the AFP or BBC - a superior, but still lesser, performance.

David,

Saying AP is slightly less pro-terrorist than AFP or BBC is what we call "damning by faint praise".

Tim

"damning with faint praise" would something like "they can actually write coherently most of the time".

Saying they are slightly better than Reuters is more of a "that's not saying much"... kind of like saying they are slightly less disgusting than several tonnes of fresh chicken offal.

I suspect that AP's Bajak and his editors would not consider Prakash's report to be "real world" as they come loaded down with his biased opinions. Apparently, we need the news on the ground reported to us by chaps who spend the better part of it running behind the human shield that is the American infantry man.

Of course, if you spend a million dollars on a Baghdad bureau, you're gonna report what you find in Baghdad, which may give you about the same feel for Iraq as if you spent a million dollars on a bureau in Manhattan to find out how ordinary Americans were going to vote in the 2004 election.

The comment about the AP reporting is right on. Unfortunately, the AP has a lot of outlets, including USA Today and even FOXNews.com.

You have to wonder, would those election workers have died if there were no AP reporter to take the picture?

Compare also, the price CNN paid to keep its Irag office open over the last decade. They had to not report uncomplimentarty news about Saddam in order to remain. That is, they had to give up any semblance of honest news reporting in order to maintain the appearance of news reporting.

That is often what "savvy locals" gets you. The NYT and news-gathering organizations continue to believe that because they unearth selective information, they retain sole rights to interpreting it. Blog news-gathering is still skeletal and unreliable (though that is likely to change year by year). So what? Other models of news-gathering become possible on the web.

The new, nimble mammals are eating the eggs of the dominant dinosaurs. Won't be long.