Good news is no news
For an example of how the press filters information for us, have a look at thie WaPo piece headlined "Wolfowitz concedes Iraq errors" and then read the entire transcript of Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz' press briefing.
Here is a part of what Wolfowitz said in context:
There is no humanitarian crisis. There is no refugee crisis. There is no health crisis. There has been minimal damage to -- to infrastructure; minimal war damage, lots of regime damage over decades, but minimal war damage to infrastructure except for telecommunications, which we had to target. There has been no environmental catastrophe, either from oil well fires or from dam breaks. And there has been no need for massive oil field repair.
So, fortunately, much of what we planned for, much of what's captured in the title of the initial office, Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, what we planned for and budgeted for, has not proved necessary. But some important assumptions turned out to underestimate the problem. Some conditions were worse than we anticipated, particularly in the security area, and there are three.
No Army units, at least none of any significant size, came over to our side so that we could use them as Iraqi forces with us today. Second, the police turned out to require a massive overhaul. Third, and worst of all, it was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting. Fighting what has been sometimes called a guerrilla war. It's only a guerrilla war in certain similarity of tactics. But even at the tactical level, I believe this will go down as the first guerrilla tactic in history in which contract killings, killings for hire, going out and soliciting young men for $500 to take a shot at an American, was the principal tactic employed.
If you're a journalist, you assume it is totally uninteresting to your readers that a lot of the worst-case situations feared by the planners didn't happen. Here is what WaPo reported based on the above:
Paul D. Wolfowitz, briefing reporters after a 4 1/2-day trip to Iraq, said that in postwar planning, defense officials made three assumptions that "turned out to underestimate the problem," beginning with the belief that removing Saddam Hussein from power would also remove the threat posed by his Baath Party. In addition, they erred in assuming that significant numbers of Iraqi army units, and large numbers of Iraqi police, would quickly join the U.S. military and its civilian partners in rebuilding Iraq, he said.
What is interesting to the journalists is the failure, not the success. Wolfowitz' briefing is a long recollection of what he perceives as progress, optimism, and a lot of praise for both the US forces, its allies, and the Iraqis themselves. Newspapers here function as a massive magnifying glass focused on negative news. Also, by removing the claim by Wolfowitz that guerrilla-style attacks was the work of contract killers, the story is also dumbed down considerably and pretty important information is left out.
I am not really complaining about the "anti-war" or "liberal" bias here, even though in this instance it may be perceived to come across that way (examples of the opposite bias can surely be found). My point is that the media is dumbing down the facts in its reporting, sensationalising isolated sentences and ignoring the large picture. Since most everything we learn, outside the range of our senses, comes to us through mass media in one way or another, it is important to be aware of this.
Glenn Reynonds, who pointed me to these links, makes a few comments as well.
4:26:32 AM 
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