It’s a point well-taken. As it has with other complex stories, traditional journalism might indeed have met its match in a conflict like Iraq’s, which contains so many layers, some contradictory, some illusory. Maybe it is time to think of another, more ambitious way to tell this story.

We’re left with this nagging feeling, however, that the overwhelming reason why we see so much “bad news” coming out of Iraq is that, in spite of a halting start-and-stop sort of progress toward democratic institutions, things are not going well on the ground. (As the New York Times noted last week, both the number of insurgents, the number of foreign terrorists and the daily number of attacks by those groups more than tripled from February, 2004 to February of this year. And during that period, both oil and electricity production in Iraq have dwindled, as has household fuel availability. Which is why Bagdhad is darker than it was two years ago.)

We’ll leave you with an example of the kind of story Massing longs for, but be warned: It isn’t encouraging. It comes from ABC News and it goes like this: The other day: in search of a “good story,” Jake Tapper visited the set of a popular sitcom, “Me and Layla” filming in the streets of Baghdad and starring the “Iraqi Danny Devito.” Tapper was going to focus on the head of the entertainment company producing the show, a man named Hamid, in an attempt to highlight those “who are trying to make the Iraqi people laugh.” Just as the ABC crew was taping a segment showing the sitcom being filmed, Tapper captured the director running to take an urgent phone call. Hamid, the man who had greenlighted “Me and Layla” and arranged for ABC to do the story, had just been assassinated.

What did Tapper learn?:

“It just goes to show, even when you are trying to do a story about comedy in Iraq, tragedy inevitably intervenes.”

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