There are only 11 US newspaper reporters in Iraq

Today, there are all of 11 U.S. newspaper reporters in Iraq, covering the biggest foreign policy story of the decade, employed by just three papers – the independent Washington Post and New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The common ownership of the former Black papers helps explain why almost every major English-language daily in Canada, apart from the one you're reading, supported the war in Iraq. Indeed, it was the paucity of divergent views in U.S. mainstream papers on the activities of the Bush administration that spurred the growth of political websites – one of the largest subject categories on the Internet. It also drove readers away from the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Toledo Blade to the online editions of the Toronto Star and the U.K. Guardian.

In 2003, Lisa Sloniowski and I created a website called Iraq 2003: Sources of News as a companion to a discussion we hosted in the library about press coverage and the war. You think I wouldn't be shocked by the paucity of reporting in Iraq 2007 but evidently there's room for me to become even more jaded.