Get it while you can!

Arthur Chrenkoff, who will very shortly retire his blog and its excellent b-weekly "Good News From Iraq" series, has posted his latest. (Also available from The Opinion Journal and Winds of Change.

This summary of good news seems to grow with each issue; compare the volume and breadth of all the good that's being done, against the drum beat defeatism from the mainstream media (MSM). How can these things be? How come we never hear any of this?

It's a head scratcher. Could it be ... Media Bias? (Scrunch face to the side ala Dana Carvey)

Well, if you follow the MILBLOGS, helpfully concentrated by first rate sites like Mudville Gazette and Blackfive, you probably see a lot of good news, a lot of heroic effort. If you read Iraqi Blogs such as Iraq The Model, you mgith see more encouragement that our efforts are not in vain.

But if you make a point of reading Chrenkoff, you no doubt will have the best sense possible of the "big picture" in Iraq.

UPDATE: In a welcome development, Chrenkoff today also reports on some surprising news from over at the Associated Press. As Chrenkoff reports:

It all started when Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of "The Tampa Tribune", received an email that many of you would be familiar with, listing in a "Did you know?" format all the underreported achievement in Iraq and ending with this sentence: "Of course we didn't know! Our media doesn't tell us!"

This prompted Ms. Goudreau to ask some questions of the AP, which supplies most of the international news for her's and many other newspapers.

And as it happens, Ms. Goudreau's questions resulted in some internal soul-searching over at AP.

And it sounds like the AP will take some action. They want to encourage editors to get their reporters out of the Palestine Hotel. They want to make better use of the few remaining embedded reporters, one more idea that will strike our readers as long overdue, if not original:

The A.P. had already decided... that it would have Robert H. Reid, an A.P. correspondent at large who has reported frequently from Iraq, write an overview every 10 days. Mr. Silverman also said the wire service would make more effort to flag articles that look beyond the breaking news.

As Chrenkoff concludes his outstanding series, and retires for a time from his service, he should feel gratified that his efforts may now be emulated. But his request of AP is somewhat more humble:

Indeed - we're not asking for the AP to publish their own regular "Good news from Iraq" round-up, but please stop treating any general news from Iraq as a paragraph nine filler in the terrorist-attack-of-the-day regular feature.

Upon first hearing news that Arthur Chrenkoff would retire, I posted a tribute that to me, says what I need to declare about his work:

With his efforts, Arthur demonstrated hope and perseverance. He role modelled much of character and determination for his friends and admirers in the blogosphere. In a very real sense, Arthur could not have done more for the troops than if he had formed his own brigade, acquired the latest armaments, and arrived like the cavalry in the combat zone. He was truly a force multiplier.