True, it's questionable how much difference better Iraq coverage would make to congressional and public opinion of the effort. With 55 percent of the public regarding the war as a mistake (see here), and with fewer than one in three agreeing with Max Boot's dubious contention that "we're winning", one is tempted to view remaining war supporters as ideologues and partisans committed to spinning the news. After all, these voices still allege that media cynicism, liberalism, and sensationalism merely obscure Iraq's ongoing growth toward stability and a functioning democracy.

At a broad level, of course, these voices are wrong. The undeniable good things happening throughout the country -- including all the schools, hospitals, and businesses being painstakingly rebuilt -- in any reasonable construction matter on a human level, of course, for the people in the affected communities. But on the policy and journalistic levels, they do not carry strategic significance, or count as hard news, in the same way that bombings and other violence, sectarian strife and tribal loyalties, or Iraqi governmental corruption and inefficacy count -- or, for that matter, in the future, in the same way that sustained improvement in the police and army ranks or reductions in the corruption and divided loyalties of government ministries would count.

But one has to hope that improved reporting could help some. While some war supporters target their complaints in the opposite direction, the fact is that a significant amount of government information and journalistic coverage underplays the difficulties in Iraq in large ways and small. In the last few days, for instance, commentators have opined that news focus on the prospect of civil war since the al-Askariya shrine bombing, while understandable, has seemed overly dramatic now that "it appears that the crisis has passed" (according to Gen. George Casey yesterday). But look at the details of this hopefully fading crisis: There's a running controversy over whether 350 civilians were killed in the post-Askariya violence, as Casey maintained (similarly, Prime Minister al-Jafari reported the total as 379), or whether other reports with a death toll over 1,000 were more accurate. The Washington Post writes:

An international official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that about 1,000 people had been killed between the day of the bombing and Monday, and said the figure came from morgue officials and others. He said those officials have since acceded to a lower official count because they feared reprisals if they did not.

Sometimes only gleaning subtle clues can suggest the inaccuracies that may exist in official U.S. accounts; a separate article in today's Post seems to discount Casey's figure entirely, continuing to cite the 1,000-plus figure in definitive terms. I suspect many, if not most accounts, unlike the Post's, will simply repeat Gen. Casey's figures. Strangely, an Associated Press story printed in The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram does neither; it fails to replicate the Post's careful comparison of accounts and settles on an unexplained figure of "at least 500". An article in The Army Times repeats the Casey number and also describes a misleading Casey claim that "many of the 18 provinces in Iraq saw little or no violence as a result of the uprising". (Does that old trick work on many people any more?)

Notwithstanding the content of the articles that follow, headlines and news summaries often cite U.S. officials' PR-intensive summaries of events, which are careful to be cautious but equally careful to convey an impression of progress. Or they highlight temporary improvements. These decisions may be justifiable in individual cases, but in the aggregate they speak eloquently to some of the damage control the media often does on the government's behalf. Meanwhile, the details of horrors are often buried within the stories, themselves often buried in the back pages, for those who still take time to read them. In today's Boston Globe, in an article headlined "On prayer day in Baghdad, driving ban helps keep peace", we learn of this incident:

The lull in violence yesterday followed a night of carnage in two southeastern Baghdad suburbs, where some 50 gunmen stormed an electricity substation and a brick factory nearby where they slaughtered Shi'ite factory workers in their sleep, police said. The attacks raised Thursday's death toll to 58.  

Highlighting this point is not an effort to argue for sensationalism or for granting undue political significance to such grisly events. The point, rather, is that such incidents, when they proliferate, undoubtedly contribute to the climate on the ground. That climate deserves at least as much attention as official pronouncements that are laden with agendas. It's misleading to acknowledge the likely horrors of that mood by acknowledging simply that things are "tense". This intuition about how things must seem to Iraqis is borne out by at least one Iraqi blogger, who writes that "The last few days have been unceasingly violent in spite of the curfew. ... We are at a point ... when things like electricity, telephones, and fuel seem like minor worries." She notes heroic cooperation among average Shiite and Sunni civilians in her neighborhood but still wonders "if this is actually what civil war is like". (While heartbreaking, her post is short and oddly understated; read the whole thing.)

Other biases in media coverage that seem to understate the magnitude of the problems in Iraq are subtler still. A chart on page A13 of today's Washington Post tracking casualties, in addition to noting that the Pentagon-confirmed death toll among U.S. forces has now reached 2,303, prints, per its usual practice, the conservative estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths, currently listed as ranging between 28,636 and 32,270. (The Post apparently is using the figures compiled at iraqbodycount.net.) The death toll is likely higher than what has been captured in the press reports that form the basis for the civilian death range, however, and the careful (but, of course, much-maligned) Johns Hopkins study, with its estimate of 98,000 civilian deaths, is dutifully cited by the Post (which uses the figure 100,000). But the Post does not bother to include the date of that study. Of course, that was conducted in September 2004, half a war ago.

Use of multiple news and information sources about the war seems more important than ever, but the media itself must engage in constant self-scrutiny to earn a broad reputation for independence and for offering perspective on the latest war news and war claims. When the hard work of investigative reporting, the cultivation of sources, and the placement of reporters on the ground for extended periods of time, where possible, has been done, such perspective is comparatively simple to offer. But it does depend on identifying enduring patterns, especially those that conflict with the hawkish consensus of what is increasingly discerned by the public (reportorial shortcomings notwithstanding) to be an incompetent but unfailingly arrogant group of policymakers.