The Real Iraq News

It's good news, bad news time. Again.

By now the pattern is blatantly obvious: As the war in Iraq worsens, so too does the war on journalists. While still clinging to the tired canard that most reporters are too liberal to tell the truth -- the "real" story -- about Iraq, the Bush administration and its allied conservative commentators also impugn the journalists' motives and question their patriotism.

"It begins to look like you're invested in America's defeat," says radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, in a typical distillation of the meme. You've heard before -- and you'll hear again and again -- the armchair analysts' claim that reporters in Iraq (where Ingraham has spent a total of eight days) deliberately ignore positive stories -- the "good news" of nation building, democratization and development -- and relentlessly focus on the "bad news" of death and destruction.

Our leading newspapers have already issued mea culpas apologizing for their inaccurate cheerleading for the war, and our network news presidents are on record as having "failed the American people" with their blind acceptance of the false rationales offered for starting it.

So it's a sad reflection on our highly partisan, shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions-later media environment that there's still even a debate over claims that reporters are biased against the war. Yet last month, with violence in the country reaching new levels, a new round of whack-a-media began, reaching its nadir with personal attacks on Christian Science Monitor correspondent (and recently freed hostage) Jill Carroll.

Have the media declared war on the war? Or have the Bush administration and its support team of pontificating pundits instead declared war on the media? Is the U.S. media biased against the war, or too supportive of it? Had the press reported different facts, would the war have unfolded differently? These and related questions were the subjects of a recent, regrettably all-male (some things never change!) Reuters Newsmakers panel discussion entitled, "Iraq: Is the Media Telling the True Story?"

James Taranto, editor of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com site, commenced by proclaiming that "the culture of the American newsroom grew out of Vietnam and Watergate." In their Iraq reporting, "journalists always fight the last war and are following the Vietnam script," he added, and see their role as "exposing foolishness and knavery." (Instead, Taranto posited, they should be exploring Cindy Sheehan's "fringe political beliefs.") New York Times "International Writer-at-Large" Roger Cohen countered by pointing out that "errors have landed the U.S. in a very bad situation, and you don't need to have an ax to grind to point that out." Cohen also decried America's polarized politics, saying that, as a result, "The problems of 26 million Iraqis get lost in the war over the war in the U.S."

Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, former director of the Combined Press Information Center in Iraq, surprisingly said that in his view there are very few journalists reporting from Iraq with a "specific agenda" and that the "good news, bad news" debate was really "opinion-based." Still, Boylan said, "the complete story isn't being told." To the lieutenant colonel, the complete story would include more reporting on schools and water purification plants that are being built -- but he also noted that drastic cutbacks in the number of reporters in Iraq have had a dramatic effect, as the media is "forced to do more with less."

Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad offered a different perspective: We're not being told the "complete story" about the war because that story is "so bad now" with "daily massacres and a civil war raging," that the full truth about the horrors of the U.S. occupation is actually being downplayed by the media. "It's not about water plants!" he concluded in exasperation.