News coverage: politics, Iraq, and more

In the Houston Chronicle, a story out of a National Press Club conference: Journalism old-timers find campaign coverage disturbing. Jack Nelson, Jules Witcover, Hal Bruno and others seem appalled at the state of journalism these days.

Jules Witcover, who began covering Washington in 1954 and has covered every presidential nominating convention for the past 44 year, agreed. "To an old geezer like me" he said, " I find it very disturbing and distorting."

The American Journalism Review asks, Whatever Happened to Iraq?

For long stretches over the past 12 months, Iraq virtually disappeared from the front pages of the nation's newspapers and from the nightly network newscasts. The American press and the American people had lost interest in the war.

Guess it's not just the press that isn't keeping a proper eye out: in Wired's Danger Room blog, Pentagon Watchdogs Swamped by Military Spending; $152 Billion a Year Goes Unaudited.

And, on a completely unrelated topic, but one of interest to me since over the last 28 years I watched the water over the reefs off of Miami and the Keys deteriorate, in National Geographic: Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral. Just one of many things, I'm sure.