I was in a University for Senior class on Social Justice this morning. In one discussion, several people complained about "the media" not reporting many aspects of the news, for example, the number of civilian deaths in Iraq.
From my iPad, I searched the New York Times for "iraq civilian death" and received a list of over 31,000 articles. I told the class this number and read the five headlines that appeared on my screen:
"A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq", 2010-10-22
"W.H.O. Says Iraq Civilian Death Toll Higher Than Cited", 2008-01-10
"Civilian Death Toll Reaches New High in Iraq, U.N. Says", 2008-11-23
"Civilian toll in Iraq increased in November"
"Civilian deaths in Iraq decrease significantly in one month"
The text shown for the last gives the lower figure as 922!
I did the same search for the Duluth News Tribune; nothing was shown from its entire archive. If I searched for "Iraq death" I received 17 items. One of these from 2006-11-10 gave an Iraqi Health Ministry estimate of 150,000 civilian war deaths.
But we shouldn't fault the DNT too much for this lack; it is not a national paper like the NYT and focuses more of its news on local and state events.
Many of these critics probably watch TV news a lot. TV news has the burden of limited time; the news given on a half-hour broadcast (oops! 22 minutes excluding commercials) is about as much as you can read in a newspaper in five minutes or less. If your "the media" is TV; is it any wonder that you miss a lot of in-depth coverage?
