Even CNN was cutting back on stories from the field because it was so much cheaper to have so-called experts and partisan officials come into its studios to expound. At the beginning of the Iraq War, hundreds of American journalists flooded into Baghdad, but after two years, as the war raged on, the only news organizations that were left full time were the wire services, CNN, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and, of course, the New York Times, which spent several million dollars a year to keep a bureau compound secure and fully staffed. It did not cut its foreign desk, but
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