This one is easy. For months, the media reported every bombing, every single piece of bad news from Iraq. But the surge has worked, and the media has gone quiet.

Rather than doing cool stories about progress and peace, the media has clammed up, and stories about progress as a result of the surge are few and far between. If it weren’t for great milbloggers like Bill Roggio, it’s hard to say if we would have heard anything at all.

The catalogue of failings of the traditional media continues to grow, but this one is, in my opinion, one of the most egregious.

Cam says: Frankly, I don’t know how you could pick another story. It truly is shocking, and the milbloggers like Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, and others are demonstrating that bloggers can not just opine about events, but step in and cover events that the mainstream media is ignoring. Good pick, Marshall.

Jim: Yup, tough to come up with anything that compares.

My second-place pick - and it’s not as big as the results of the Iraq surge - is, believe it or not, the economy and the housing bubble popping. And it’s not so much that the story was underreported (although the bubble growing and potential risk in previous years looks astonishingly underreported in retrospect) as poorly reported. I don’t think I’m an idiot. But I still haven’t gotten any article that explained why giant international banks thought it was wise to purchase the giant home loans made to people with lousy credit.

Another thing - not long ago many of the world’s central banks got together to pump liquidity into the global economy, for the first time since 9/11. That’s the sort of thing that sounds ominous, but it got two lines on the radio news in the car, and not much coverage elsewhere. Is the global economy on the verge of some real trouble? I feel like a lot of financial and economic reporting might as well be written in Swahili.