Paul Waldman
The Gadflyer

In the latest of his analyses of the press' performance on the Iraq war, Michael Massing includes this rather incredible statement:

"At the moment, there's real sensitivity about the perceived political nature of every story coming out of Iraq," a Baghdad correspondent for a large US paper told me in mid-October. "Every story from Iraq is by definition an assessment as to whether things are going well or badly." In reality, he said, the situation in Iraq was a catastrophe, a view "almost unanimously" shared by his colleagues. But, he added, "Editors are hypersensitive about not wanting to appear to be coming down on one side or the other."

This is unsurprising, but nonetheless utterly appalling. The Bush administration has succeeded in making facts themselves a matter of partisan contestation. So if the facts reflect poorly on the administration, reporters feel obligated to ignore them completely, or perhaps inject some fantasy into their stories to balance things out…

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