Challenging Times was a television programme on RTÉ in Ireland that ran during the 1990s.
Presented by Kevin Myers of the Irish Times, and sponsored by that newspaper, it was essentially the same format as University Challenge in the UK, being a quiz show involving competing teams from different Irish universities and other third level institutions in the country.
In today's edition, the Times said the city "has grown increasingly violent, with a complex web of sectarian agendas playing itself out almost daily on the streets." Shiite militias, reporter Robert Worth noted, are even fighting British troops.
If it did that, it could (and no doubt would) say that it does this with a heavy heart -- while pointing out that several years of sacrificing our treasury, and the lives and limbs of thousands of Americans, is quite enough to give the Iraqis a good head start on solving their own problems.
And if the Times needs just one more reason to shift course, surely it is provided in the fresh evidence, from the federal response to Katrina, that this gang occupying the White House does not deserve, and can not be trusted, to continue to carry out our open-ended commitment in Iraq.
The idea was to to take time out to talk about us, to talk about what we, as editors, do, to explore the motivations that got us into the business in the first place and figure out why we stay in the business even in the face of enormous stress and pressures.
It also was an attempt, quite honestly an ego-fulfilling attempt, to differentiate myself from nearly all the anchorpeople in the United States at that time, mostly on local stations but including the networks, who were primarily news readers and certainly had nothing to do with the editing or the writing of their newscasts.
Naturally, that being television, within a week of the time that I identified myself as managing editor, one of the news readers at one of our largest CBS-owned stations insisted that if I could be a managing editor, he had to be a managing editor.
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