Background images in CSS

I’m having a heck of a time trying to get my background images to work right with CSS…basically I’m trying ot have a “news updates” sort of box in the background and text on top of it…but

if I use CSS for the image…it appears ONLY where there is text on top of it…so I end up with text on top of the parts of the image I don’t want it on [such as the header, seen below] and also the image just blatently stops where the text stops…on the other hand if I just put the background images in the HTML then they need to be absolutely perfect dimensions to line up with the text or they will start tiling, and that’s bs cuz if I want to add or change the text later, then it will become problematic…

anyway, I feel like CSS is the way to go here…my question is just how do I get the bg image how I want it so the text doesn’t flow over it, etc etc.

thanks in advance