What Report? Oh That Report

Faced with declining poll numbers and a public that has grown suspicious the administration has decided to attack the messenger, or the media, which is always a crowd pleasing activities among the red staters.

While some might think that the more than 2,000 Americans deaths since the start of hostilities in Iraq is important, apparently a bigger issue with whether the media is accurately reporting what's going on in Iraq or are just a bunch of negative nellies.

But leave it to the press to do a poor job of defending themselves. In the Sunday's Washington Post Ombudsman column (unbelievably titled The Post and the Whole Picture in Iraq), and a Monday column (A Turning Point In Iraq) by Post media critic Howard Kurtz, the issue of whether the media was being too tough on the administration was reviewed.

There were laundry lists of examples but after thorough review, well very little was decided. It's just too bad there isn't a neutral party to review of the situation in Iraq to tell us if things are better or worse off than people believe.

Oh wait, there is such a report! Last week Keith Olbermann on Countdown reviewed a U.S. State Department report titled Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which Olbermann pointed out had been released at a news conference earlier this month, with Secretary of State Rice herself delivering the opening remarks, the 23 pages on Iraq stating unequivocally that even a highly selective inventory of the terrorist attacks in that country during the last year could barely begin to catalog all the violence.

Quote, 'Bombings, executions, killings, kidnappings, shootings, and intimidation were a daily occurrence throughout all regions and sectors of society. A illustrative list of those attacks, even a highly selective one, could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence,' the report also stating that the attacks were being waged by any number of people, not just insurgents, for any number of reasons.

So basically things are horrible over in Iraq and if the State Department is to be believed, perhaps even worse than the picture the media is painting.

So why is the media reporting on a study that shows that their reporting probably skewed? Who knows. Perhaps they don't want the public to know how bad it really is over there.