1 Oh, great. Sand lot football from a bunch of pencil necks.

2 Greg, take your defeatist, pessimistic rhetoric elsewhere please. You really bum me out.

3 If only oue elected leaders and the people of these United States had the foresight to have listened to Bluto in the very beginning.
Aside from one or two incorrect observations, such as the "What if they gave a civil war and nobody came" Bluto has been 100% on the money !
The part of the Post article that I liked the most was when they likened it to Michael Jackson's Moonwalk. The United States will appear to be moving forward but.......

4 Hello, Im back again
To share with you
My heart and soul
Are you surprised?
I said I would
So here I am

Its time for us
To say goodbye
So until we meet again
Keep smirkin
Keep smirkin
Keep smirkin
Keep smirkin
Smiriririrk!

5 Of course what CENTCOM issues are news releases, which, as a writer of many of them in your past life, you yourself Bluto know to be vastly different than news. Therefore using one to prove the bias of the other isn't accurate.

I still hold to the idea that, for the most part, news of substance is what the powerful would rather you didn't know; everything after that is pre-determined publicity.

By that measure —which is of course arguable —  releases on successful operations from CENTCOM are no more news than the fact that millions of people weren't killed today in traffic accidents could be considered news coming from the Council to Eliminate Seatbelts. It's the dozen deaths across the state that get the coverage because that's the issue. I

I would imagine organizations like CENTCOM to be pretty sophisticated in message management. In other words, these guys ain't Ernie Pyle as much as they're the equals of journalists in the civilian realm, just writing for a different source.

I'll confess you'd be hard pressed to find Ernie in any of today's media outlets, civilian or military.

6 The main difference between advertising/public relations writers and what passes for journalists these days is that the former tend strongly toward being more honest in their writing than the latter. After all, admen can be sued for false advertising, while the public and individuals have virtually no recourse against journalists.

Your attempted point comes from a misunderstanding. I'm not decrying the MSM for not reporting when something bad doesn't happen. I'm condemning them for deliberately ignoring daily operations in which scores of insurgents and terrorists are captured and killed. This is news by any definition. The failure to report these stories is undeniable evidence of the gross cultural and political bias of the mainstream press. Even someone like you should recognize that democracy is endangered by a politcized press.

7 I really really want to comment on this post but with Big and Long being the terms here I'll pass. 
 
 
 
Nah we need more guys and we need they to stay a long time.  Hopefully some day we can have less. But take and hold does make some sence but it increases the density of your men thus increasing deaths.  I'm not so sure it's a thing about how many die in a day but just one death every day.  This am on NRP the story was two US servicement killed.  But no mention of all the deaths,arrests and pressure on the enemy . Nor any mention of Iraqi's part in fighting the enemy. They are there in the highest density and losse the most men but nat as many as the jihadis.  But I'll give the jihadis credit they do kill more innocents.  Hey that's something [end sarcasm]

8 But the dems promised to bring the troops home now.

9 I agree with Bluto. Failure to allow all contents to be posted is bad. It leads to a biased untruthful look into the truth. Is that like deleteing?

10 Ha, yes, even "someone like me" can see the danger of a politicized press. The editorial style of conglomerates such as Sinclair Broadcasting and the phenomenon of client-funded VNRs passing as news--a practice, incidently, defended by Mr. Bush--are two examples that immediately come to mind.

Would "someone like you" condemn these examples or pursue your legal options against their sources? I have to wonder.

From what I've read of your past posts and the arguments you've made to defend them, you seem far less interested in a pure, nonpoliticized press than you are in one that is just as politicized, only along your lines of thought. Some sort of "necessary counterbalance of truth" is how I think you've characterized it. 

Well, that's too easy. You either support politicized content or you don't. Which will it be for you?

As for the editorial ommissions of supposed progress in Iraq, measured by your metric of "scores of insurgents and terrorists ... captured and killed," I would point out that the average consumer of news couldn't care less how many nameless, faceless turban-heads from Iraq are killed every day. They want to know out about the death of the soldier from
Smalltown America because that's who they know. And the media is in the business--liberal media, conservative media, all media--of telling them.

You could have a 100,000 terrorists killed every 30 seconds and I doubt the typical American would say this war was worth the US blood and treasures lost. And that can hardly be blamed on the media.

I recall the early days of this war when the media dutifully repeated every statement from Bush, every claim from Rumsfeld, every soundbite from Cheney, and for all I know the majority of CENTCOM news releases.

It's when the facts on the ground no longer match the rhetoric, as is the case now, that media finally stepped up. And no terrorist body-count in the world will make up the difference now.