Now that I’ve fully recovered — it was so bad that it must have been bird flu — I can finally get back to what’s going on with the Iraqi election results. Only it’s already beginning to wind down. The political groups are criss-crossing with dozens of talks all over the country to work out a compromise. New elections are certainly out of the question, but it looks like some of the demands of the Sunnis and seculars will be fulfilled and the Shia-Kurdish alliance will evolve into more of a national unity government. Final results will be released in the next few days and we’ll start to see what unfolds from there.

I know this because I’ve been reading Iraq the Model, which has told me everything and more than the mainstream media has in its stories. Richard Fernandez from The Belmont Club, who has been watching this story unfold through the eyes of ITM as well, had this to say in a recent email exchange commenting on the unfolding events:

I think there is too little information coming out of Iraq right now. The only way forward is to try and build up independent sources of information. We’ve made a start and others are working at it too. But there’s a long way to go.

And so we’ve been watching, but it hasn’t been the New York Times or the Washington Post, it’s been Iraq the Model. It crosses my mind that while perhaps the independent media hasn’t been built up to a great degree in Iraq, the people who live in the country itself seem to know perfectly well what’s going on. The country has domestic and foreign television stations, dozens of credible newspapers and hundreds of others, and great programs like Radio Sawa that broadcast all over. Access to information is actually quite robust.

The problem may not be so much that independent information is sprouting too slowly in Iraq, but that the information isn’t being relayed across the Atlantic. While most newspapers are sticking with the Reuters bomb of the week reports, Omar and Mohammed are taking the news from multiple Iraqi sources and presenting that information in a manner that actually helps the reader understand the real political situation in the country. So, question, since that’s the media’s job, why isn’t it doing that?