Rory O’Connor on AlterNet interviews Jonathan Klein over Iraq War coverage. It’s a good read…

“We’re being very aggressive in covering the war at the moment,” Klein began. “We have lots of people with lots of expertise on the ground in Baghdad now. Generally, I think we’re doing a good job of daily reporting, and we also have the capacity to do in-depth reporting and documentaries. In fact we’ve aired five or six docs and specials already, including an hourlong look at WMD, two hours on how war is going, and so forth.”

While praising his own, Klein was critical of his critics, saying, “It’s naive for otherwise intelligent people to assume CNN has any role other than reporting the facts. They may oppose the war, but the conduct of the war is simply not up to CNN.

Klein hits a home run in my opinion with this passage…

“The vast majority of Americans do not feel the way your readers do, and do not express those feelings to us,” he stated flatly. “In fact the number of people watching CNN today is higher than 10 years ago. There’s no mass disaffection with either CNN or the MSM. The reality is that every week 66 million American get their news from watching CNN — more than any other news network — so we must be satisfying their needs for information. But we can’t cover everything, and we can’t please every fraction of the audience all the time.

“You’re talking about a highly partisan and definitely minority point of view,” the CNN/US president reiterated. “It’s really just a certain segment of extremists who don’t see their particular point of view reflected enough. And as I said, we hear similar complaints from extreme poles of both right and left.”