Mr. Mark Yost of Minnesota gets it.

Biased coverage

"An assistant editorial page editor with the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press has written a column, headlined 'Why They Hate Us,' castigating his fellow journalists for biased coverage of the Iraq War," the Media Research Center's Rich Noyes reports at http://www.mediaresearch.org/. (The article is here.) Mark Yost explained that he saw the same media pattern when he served in the U.S. Navy in the 1980s.

"Substitute 'insurgent' for 'Sandinista,' 'Iraq' for 'Soviet Union,' 'Bush' for 'Reagan' and 'war on terror' for 'Cold War,' and the stories need little editing," he said. "The U.S. is 'bad,' our enemies 'understandable' if not downright 'good.' "

Mr. Yost, in his July 12 column, chastised most of the Iraq coverage as inaccurate.

"I know the reporting's bad because I know people in Iraq," he said. "A Marine colonel buddy just finished a stint overseeing the power grid. When's the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up."
(Thanks to Inside Politics and The Washington Times.)