And the war goes on. The war in Iraq continues on, contrary to the way the media has represented it since Bush's "Mission Accomplished" media blitz so long ago. A civil war of sorts has been raging on continually, but the daily death toll is no longer on the front page every day.

I'd always wondered, while reading about long-running wars elsewhere in the world, how people deal with the constant bad news, since war inevitably produces bad news. Now I know: the war's space allotment on the front pages of newspapers becomes smaller, and smaller, and smaller...

The definition of "news" in the U.S. is based heavily on the idea of novelty: ongoing tragedies, like poverty, war, famine, abuse, or neglect are not "new" day to day, and so fall from attention. And that's happening here.