It is indeed too soon to pass judgment on Iraq, but bad news is what compels and sells. Journalism's once-heroic goal of seeking truth has been subjugated, it seems, to the more commercially expedient mandate of "sexing up" the news.
With notable exceptions, the media increasingly are perceived as the world's pimp, selling cheap stories for slicker suits and flashier careers. In the absence of salable truths about lying politicians - the Woodward 'n' Bernstein template that introduced careerism to newsrooms - reporters are increasingly willing to fictionalize.
Not all, of course. And honest mistakes admitted and corrected are something else. But too many of today's mistakes are of a different order. Too many reporters maliciously alter truth - from fabricating stories and sources (Jayson Blair) to selectively using partial quotes to purposely distort meaning.
Just this week, the Washington Post ran a correction on a story that took one of Vice President Dick Cheney's quotes so out of context that the impression presented was exactly the opposite of what Cheney obviously meant.
We so want bad news, apparently, that we'll avert our eyes from the good. But do we so want bad news that we'd rather fail in Iraq? That we're willing to compromise American lives? Not consciously, perhaps. Not the way France wants us to fail, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described in the same Thursday paper. You'll want to catch that, too.
But our obsession with the downside, ignoring the progress that is being made in Iraq (too extensive to list here) in favor of items that suggest failure and quagmire borders on the pathological. Has our self-loathing come to this?
As the week's news cycle wound down, it was hard not to notice the media's palpable disappointment that Isabel didn't quite measure up to our bad-news standard. It was almost embarrassing to watch TV reporters sacrificing perfectly good hairdos as they struggled along the Eastern seaboard trying to make riveting that which we know about hurricanes.
One gets the feeling, too, that everyone would have been a little bit happier if hundreds had died, if the Dalai Lama had proclaimed the Iraq war a tragic mistake, and if Tony Blair had "sexed up" intelligence after all.