The Obvious is Not-So Obvious to All

Jeff Jacoby couldn't say it any more clearly. You may not be getting the whole story.

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WHAT WAS the most important news out of Iraq last week?

That depends on what you consider ''important." Do you see the war against radical Islam and Ba'athist fascism as the most urgent conflict of our time? Do you believe that replacing tyranny with democratic self-government is ultimately the only antidote to the poison that has made the Middle East so dangerous and violent? If so, you'll have no trouble identifying the most significant development in Iraq last week: the landslide victory of the new Iraqi Constitution.
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But that isn't how the mainstream media saw it.

Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post's front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined ''Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and ''Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of US Deaths." A nearby graphic -- ''The Toll" -- divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service -- active duty, National Guard, and Reserves.
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But that isn't a message Big Media cares to emphasize. Hostile to the war and to the administration conducting it, the nation's leading news outlets harp on the negative and pessimistic, consistently underplaying all that is going right in Iraq. Their fixation on the number of troops who have died outweighs their interest in the cause for which those fallen heroes fought -- a cause that advanced with the ratification of the new constitution.
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Read the whole thing.