Six Golden Rules for the LWM to Live By in Covering the War on Terror

Here's the intro, but read the whole thing:

Mark Yost, an editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote a column questioning the quality of mainstream media reporting on the War in Iraq. Yost, a Navy veteran himself, was getting a jarringly different picture of the war from friends returning from combat than he was seeing in the pages of his own paper.

Yost’s column set off a wicked firestorm on Poynter. He garnered what could only charitably be called undiplomatic criticism from an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, the Washington editor for Knight-Ridder newspapers, which owns the Pioneer Press, and the director of the Knight-Ridder Baghdad bureau, among many others.

This week, the Minnesota-based bloggers at PowerLine, got their hands on a leaked internal memo instructing the staff of the Press to cover more aspects of the war. The paper, the memo states, is strong on covering the deaths of soldiers and weaker on covering the more mundane details of the war, the reconstruction, and how they affect families on the homefront.

Odd, that’s almost exactly what Yost said. His column was called, “Why They Hate Us,” in reference to those servicemen and women who feel they’re unfairly represented by the press corps. The media’s response to “Why They Hate Us” offers many new lessons in that same vein, if the media is willing to listen. Here are the Six Golden Rules I gleaned from it.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)