Corporate Whore Media moves to the right

This is just appalling. Some anonymous wingnut(s) bombards the "MSM" with an email asking for more stories about schools being painted, and they knuckle under.

Editors Ponder How to Present a Broad Picture of Iraq
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune, has received the same e-mail message a dozen times over the last year.

"Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?" the anonymous polemic asks, in part. "Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?"

"Of course we didn't know!" the message concludes. "Our media doesn't tell us!"

Did they hold steady and insist on reporting the actual news, and refuse to bow down to a transparently partisan political agenda? Sadly, no!

"The bottom-line question was, people wanted to know if we're making progress in Iraq," Ms. Goudreau said, and the A.P. articles were not helping to answer that question.

"It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place," she said. "But there's a perception that we're not telling the whole story."

Here comes the punchline:

Mr. Silverman also said the wire service would make more effort to flag articles that look beyond the breaking news. As it turned out, he said, most of the information in the anonymous e-mail message had been reported by The A.P., but the details had been buried in articles or the articles had been overlooked.