I wan't someone to do something on the Marsh Arabs now that the water is beginning to flow back into the marshlands.
That's an easy one: Because they don't want to know. The last thing in the world they want is to turn up a lot of information that contradicts what they've already decided beforehand--namely, that things are terrible, and it's all Bush's fault.
A rhetorical question, I trust. You know perfectly well why not.
"I wan't someone to do something on the Marsh Arabs now that the water is beginning to flow back into the marshlands."
It would be a great story. But, to do it, one would:
a. Have to depart Baghdad, leaving the bar and one's drinking buddies behind.
b. Have to do some actual journalistic work -- some research, some interviewing, some reporting -- without benefit of any press releases to provide content.
c. In the end, see it spiked...because no mainstream editor worth his liberal salt is going to run a story about how the American military (and the Bush administration) is restoring the environment.
Accordingly, we are left with the Internet (and Mark Steyn) to supply us with facts, whose validity we can be trusted to determine for ourselves.
I'm sure the N.Y. Times has sent a legion of copy "persons" and stringers over to do the leg work for the "correspondents." They'll be posting their stories any day now, as soon as they're vetted by Pinch and Howell.
If you read the simplistic swill by Thomas Friedman posted elsewhere on FR today, you'll be able to answer your own question: apart from Steyn and one or two others, there aren't any "enterprising journalists." They just want to sit on their dead butts, read the Columbia Journalism Review, think of snappy GWB put-downs for their next stories and dream of writing something liberal enough to impress the Pulitzer Committee.
As a former journalist I've never been more disillusioned and disgusted with what should be an inspiring and honorable calling. Most of today's "journalists" are sycophants and whores.
For the very same reasons that we don't hear of the realities in South Africa.
It doesn't fit "The Agenda".