It seems as though cable news networks exist solely to broadcast footage like that of the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled to the ground. I am beginning to think that it simply isn't possible to get any real information from any of the majors. Fox News is useless, MSNBC is pedestrian, and CNN is CNN. Nancy Franklin wrote a great piece on this subject for The New Yorker last week, and it can be found here. For instance:

The cable news networks’ ratings have shot up many hundreds of points as a result of the war, and, even with the sand blowing in their eyes and the war not going as well as they and the White House had led us to believe it would, they weren’t about to let go of the adrenaline rush that they had helped fuel. ... None of them used the weather delay to do any in-depth stories on the history of Iraq or of other countries’ relations with Iraq, or to discuss the various factions in the country—the Kurds, the Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Instead, they began to hedge their bets on the war, focussing on “the mood of America” and on heartrending stories of service and sacrifice.

I have to admit that I'm much less interested in a human interest story about Joe Army leaving his wife and six kids behind on a dirt farm in Kentucky to go "fight for our freedoms" than I am about what's actually happening in the region in question. What about Syria? And Israel? And Iran? And who exactly was doing the beating of the Saddam statue? Which segment of Iraqi society was that? What about those who clearly oppose American military presence in the area? Only for so long can I watch stuff like that described by Franklin:

But, back here at home, it’s amateur hour too much of the time: when you hear a young CNN reporter ask the father of a P.O.W. to describe the soldier’s “relationship with his children”—who are two years old and five months old—and then ask him, “Is it, like, you’re going to be sitting by the phone?,” you are, like, glad that there are still people over fifty in the news business, who have some gravity and a grasp of grammar.

Like a damn cliche, I usually end up trolling the websites of the different respectable newspapers, like the NYTimes and the WashPost and picking up underreported tidbits from muckrakers like Matt Drudge. But then I also end up going to the BBC. Case in point, this little thing at the BBC News website. The reporter in Jordan tells about one man's reaction to the siege of Baghdad:

Another man told me it was the saddest news he'd ever heard, because it opened the door to British and American colonialism throughout the region. He said: "God protect us from what will come".

I start to wonder about the words the man actually spoke, and if he really does want god to protect him from what will come, ignoring god's ineptitude at preventing the situation in the first place. Or is it just a common cultural phrase, like if I were to exclaim, "Godammit!" When I use that phrase, I'm not literally calling upon the Judeo-Christian-Islamic deity to personally "damn" something for me, whatever that means. Is the Arabic phrase in question of a similar tenor? Franklin also mentions that the NYTimes has been pretty good about displaying the horrors as well as the relative victories. I have to agree. If you haven't looked at some of the slide shows at nytimes.com, do so. There's some incredible stuff in there. I particularly liked the photo of a bunch of Basra residents who

...broke into a fearsome military intelligence prison where hundreds had languished in tiny cells and electrical wires still protruded from the walls, ready to be used for torture. [In the photo], they read pages of secret files blown out of buildings by bombs.

I don't have a link directly to the image, but go here and find the slide show entitled Prison Tours, Vengeance and Tea. I'll try to put a copy of it up here later.