The 'Media' Not Reporting Correctly on Iraq

"Media" is Actually Underreporting the Violence One of the more pathetic things coming from Bush and his apologists lately is their continual whining about how the 'media' is portraying the news out of Iraq. As it turns out, the miserable news coming from the media on how things are going there matches up pretty well with the assessment completed by U.S. State Department just earlier this month! I guess Bush and Co. need to find another scapegoat - or have the State Department change their report. Harsh reality: Bush administration's own grim Iraq assessment

Repeated suggestions by the White House and friendly commentators that the news media's selective displays of terrorist attacks in Iraq are warping American public opinion seem to belie several unclassified assessments of the situation produced by the U.S. government itself. In fact, just two weeks ago the Bush administration publicly released a detailed report stating that "even a highly selective" inventory of the terrorist attacks inside Iraq "could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence" there. It comes from the Iraq section of a congressionally mandated annual compilation, "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," produced by the State Department and released at a press conference March 8. If anything, the State Department's candid assessments would seem to indicate that things might be far worse than the press is currently able to report.