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Great story in next month's Vanity Fair about the New York Times bureau in Iraq, the only U.S paper that hasn't cut back it's in-country coverage. The New York Times’s Lonely War.

I didn't know, until I noticed it in Dan Gillmor's blog, that respected McClatchy Washington reporters Warren Stroebel, Jonathan Landay and Nancy Youssef, have a blog, called Nukes and Spooks . Among other things, it monitors a good list of security and counterterrorism blogs. This is one I'll be checking in on. Gillmor brought attention to this posting, Memo to Scott McClellan: Here's what happened , in which Stroebel and Landay recap the work McClatchy (then Knight-Ridder) bureau reporters did in exposing the administration propaganda leading up to the war in Iraq. It contains a pretty damning list of administration lies and errors, which were documented long before McClellan's book. But what I really like about this blog posting is that in a list of bureau reporters responsible for the coverage, they include bureau researcher Tish Wells. We confess that here at McClatchy, which purchased Knight Ridder two years ago, we do have a dog in this fight. Our team - Joe ...

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 unrel...

Please read this story about one soldier killed in Iraq and how his death affected everyone who had anything to do with getting his body home to be buried in Indiana. In Esquire, The Things That Carried Him , by Chris Jones. Joe Montgomery was only one of more than 4,000. This is essential reading for anyone who thinks the deaths of soldiers is not important to every American. Sergeant Dunaway sat in the jump seat between the pilots, Sergeant Montgomery's paperwork and medals on his lap. As they approached Freeman Field, Jones and Linton circled, high in the bright blue sky. From the ground, it looked as though the pilots were offering a sweeping final salute. They were only getting their bearings. After they touched down and taxied toward the open-sided hangar, they took stock of the waiting crowd. This is going to be tough, Linton thought. "It just seems the smaller the town, the bigger the turnout," he said later. ...Karen Giles tells a story about another young airma...

In the Miami Herald, a collaboration between long-time Herald Caribbean correspondent Don Bohning (author of The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965 ) and Jack Hawkins, paramilitary chief of the Bay of Pigs operation: Kennedy, Bush made similar mistakes in Cuba, Iraq . From Hawkins: Key high-level civilian officials of both the Kennedy and Bush administrations had similar characteristics which caused them to make serious mistakes in the management of the Cuba operation in 1961 and the ongoing Iraq War: They had little or no military experience but were inclined to make important decisions about military operational matters against the advice of experienced military officers. In both administrations, the Secretary of Defense tended to suppress the free expression of opinions by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to isolate them from the President, who needed to know their opinions first-hand and unfiltered.