With the immense amount of professional and not-so-professional media criticism proliferating on the web these days, some have said that classic journalism publications like the
American Journalism Review and the
Columbia Journalism Review have become irrelevant dinosaurs. But
CJR is proving its doubters wrong.
The magazine is in the midst of publishing an absolutely outstanding
collection of first-person accounts from dozens of different reporters who spent time working in Iraq during the war.
It paints a picture of a country sliding inexorably into disaster, and details the difficulties of practicing basic journalism in a bloody war zone. The piece should be required reading for anyone interested in how conflicts get reported-- and the gulf between what journalists see around them and the perceptions of readers back home.