The Filter of the Press

On Meet the Press this Sunday there was discussion of the Bush Administration's frustration with an apparent filter on news from Iraq. It seems to them, and to me, that good news is censored and bad news is sent through. Immediately after the other three panelist bemoaned any and every piece of bad news William Safire pointed out that the previous answers were a classic example of the filter in question. Even after highlighting the existence of the filter, Katty Kay from BBC talked about how the race for the Democrat nomination would have to be resolved on something other than the bad news that Iraq was. She's clearly deluded by her own propaganda.

The war in Iraq was a success and the current situation there is much better than before we evicted the Dictator. The fact that we have yet to find massive quantities of WMDs doesn't change this. Yet according to the press this failure is much more important to harp on than the numerous mass graves and the fact that these will no longer be made.

Another failure according to the press is the large amount of money needed to reconstruct Iraq. The reason we have to spend billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq has much less to do with the damage from the war than it does with billions of dollars Hussein put into his palaces, his weapons programs and crates of cash scattered all over the city instead of maintaining the road, hospitals and schools.