The news is, like, totally good from Baghdad, according to a comprehensive debriefing of print and T.V. reporters who've worked in Iraq in the New York Observer. For one thing, they report that it's really "like more than 500 Iraqis being killed violently every month rather than 2,000"! With the war "waning" in this fashion, CBS News keeps a full-time Baghdad producer-chief there—but sees no need for a full-time correspondent. And yet some reporters are finding that when they come back to the U.S., they're peppered with questions that would be easily answered if anyone read their stories. Even Courtney Kealy of Fox News gets it: "People say to me, what's the real story in Iraq? I say, read the books that have come out and won Pulitzers. Look at my friends' articles. Look at the stories I've done. They're not looking, and they're not reading; they don't want to."

What's really different over there now is that reporters don't get shot or kidnapped if they stay in one spot for more than 20 minutes! That must be nice.

Richard Engel of NBC News acknowledged the recent drop in violence, and said it gave reporters more room to report.

"How much you can move is impacted by the level of danger.... I recently went down to Najaf, which is south of Baghdad. I was walking around the city doing interviews, without any kind of security protection or back up at all. That felt great. I hadn't done that in years. A Chinese restaurant, takeout, just opened up down the street from our bureau. There were no businesses opening in '06 and '07. People are getting out more. You see more people on the streets going to markets. When I go to do interviews, I can stay longer."

The conventional wisdom has always been that a reporter can't stay in one place for more than 20 minutes—the amount of time security experts think it takes for eyewitnesses to report their whereabouts to potential kidnappers, and for the kidnappers to lay their trap. Journalists are routinely increasing their stays to 45 minutes or more.

The BBC's John Muir visited the National Archive, which is currently being patched back together after the war, for an hour and a half. But his security people were not happy about it.