Newsertainment Tonight

From AP's David Bauder:

NEW YORK -- News reporters frequently complain that their work isn't getting the attention it deserves, but CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan took the extra step.

She wrote to friends and family members asking for their help in getting her report on street fighting in Baghdad on the air. She never, the network said Wednesday, intended to make the plea public. But eventually it got out.

Logan filed the gritty report about dangerous conditions near the Green Zone on Jan. 18 for the CBS Evening News. The network didn't air it, deeming some of the images of tortured bodies that it contained too graphic, and because another story Logan filed that day from Iraq was more newsworthy, said Sandy Genelius, news spokeswoman.

Instead, the report was streamed on the news division's Web site. It ends with an Iraqi blaming the United States for the "death and destruction" brought to the country.

Shortly after, Logan wrote her e-mail, telling friends the story was largely being ignored, even though the violence was happening every single day in Baghdad. Her message was titled: "Help."

"I would be very grateful if any of you have a chance to watch this story and pass the link on to as many people as you know possible," she wrote. "It should be seen. And people should know about this."

She asked her recipients to send a comment to CBS, a division of CBS Corp., to show that people were interested, and that they believed her report was not too gruesome to air.

Full story here.

It's getting to the point on network television, on any television news outlet actually, where they're scared of showing actual news. They're more interested in newsertainment (I didn't coin that one). This illustrates that.

TV news outlets want viewers, and maybe they'd realize that, if what they aired was news and not crap, they'd get those viewers. My lame, sickly work computer won't allow me to watch it, but on the surface, I don't see any reason that everyone shouldn't check it out and show CBS and every other network they want to see what's going on, not what producers deem most interesting, and certainly not what on-air personalities "think."

Watch the video here.

I'm sure, now that AP's picked up on it, that by the end of the hour, it'll be on ABC's home page.