If what you say about the biases cutting both ways, I ask you to ponder this. In almost every instance of a story being completely wrong or fabricated, we find it is in the direction which makes the occupation look bad. Meanwhile, atrocities such as Michael Yon has been reporting on get little or no mention, certainly not prominent coverage.

Yon and Roggio may be biased, they openly hope we will succeed, but their reporting has been excellent, and far more accurate than the wire services. Where are the stories that have embarrassed them?

One may take issue with their analysis, though in both cases they have been very willing to criticize, but it has been pretty good as well looking back on it.

Yon early on called the war a civil war, and got a lot of heat for doing so. Some may quibble with the term, but as he defines it, his analysis has surely been correct. He has never that I am aware of acted as if the war was anything but what it is, the good the bad and the ugly. His analysis of what does and doesn’t work well has been very good, and the military seems to be making strides in implementing the very things he has reported on that have been most successful. He and Roggio have given far more nuanced and accurate descriptions of the actual military actions than have the media.

Roggio in particular noted signs of progress in Anbar long before the mainstream media did, and while he never acted as if those signs heralded guaranteed success, he did feel the approaches being tried were the right way to go, and that improvement was possible, for which many scoffed. He has been shown to be prescient, though he would have been right in my opinion even of the attempt had failed. It was the right way to go, it did have the potential for success, fortune however doesn’t always smile upon even the best of efforts. Regardless of that philosophical point, what is wrong with his reporting on Anbar regardless of his bias? Michael isn’t concerned as much with their bias as the sad direction of that bias, and the fact that it has lead to egregious errors and a lazy portrayal of events. Roggio and Yon’s reporting and analysis cannot be accused of either even if their hopes for success may go unfulfilled.

It may fit Michael’s narrative, but is it true?

So I’ll just shorten my reply to,

What Joshua said…

Cheers.

P.S. I would like to point out one curiosity in the body.

Narratives are powerful devices through which complex ideas can be simplified and passed on to others.

To which you display nicely at the end of your work.

What too many fail to understand is that terrorists are coming no matter what we do. The only way to stop them is to fight them, and the only way to fight them is to deny them any and all opportunities to implant themselves in a society where they can fester and poison others.

Seems to me, that this narrative business is catching.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative, now does it.

Well… It doesn’t fit their narrative, but it fits yours. Like a glove.

Do blogs, which make no pretense to objectivity, count?

That’s the difference. Yon and Roggio aren’t pretending to be an “objective” source. They in effect argue for their narrative, and the reader is free to take it or leave it.

I read an article in Reason eons ago that described the whole “objective” reporting thing as a 19th century marketing schtick that never went away. At the time most newspapers were owned by political parties or other interest groups with well-known points of view so some independents began marketing themselves as “objective” as a way of differentiating themselves from the herd.

yours/
peter.

For example, you say “the media,” yet don’t really define which media. Do blogs, which make no pretense to objectivity, count? When Yon repeats his own personal experiences (“Anbar sure looks great to me”) and merely quotes officers in his stories, how is that a more complete picture than a Reuters reporter sending stringers into the local community to gather opinions? In the end, they both boil down to hearsay — which is what all reporting is anyway. Many different media organizations have many different narratives, and they all contain elements of truth and elements of outright fabrication — whether it is CNN, the BBC, Fox News, the Washington Post, UPI, the Christian Science Monitor, or the New York Times.

That being said, I don’t know how you can say the American press, or the super-majority of the country that opposes the war, considers Al-Qaeda the “good guys” in this conflict. It is entirely possible — indeed, quite common, now — to consider two ideas at once: Al-Qaeda is a nasty, horrible group of men who must be stopped, and that our presence in Iraq is their best recruiting tool. That is, in fact, what most of us who oppose the war on principles beyond base anti-Americanism feel: the mission in Iraq is actually counter-productive to the GWOT, and, rather than desiring to provide our enemies a “victory” (itself a hollow and difficult thing to argue), our wish to withdraw is in fact based in a grander strategic calculus that what would happen should Iraq no longer have the unifying antagonism of the U.S. military on its soil.

Take the Washington Post’s early Baghdad Bureau chief, Rajiv Chandrasekaran. His book, Life in the Emerald City was deeply critical of the U.S. occupation while also being sympathetic to the men in charge. He is opposed to it on the grounds of it sheer, brazen, willful incompetence — not any sort of animus toward the U.S. While his narrative is quite explicitly that of an imperial power conquering and occupying a country, that is also because we have behaved like an Imperial power conquering and occupying the country. You don’t build an enormous, Vatican-sized embassy with a 16,000 sq.ft. ambassador’s residence if you’re simply a benevolent democratizing power.

As for Domenici… well, he’s not the only one. Again, there are a lot of us, a lot of politicians too, who have turned against the war because it has been so astoundingly botched, to continue to support it for its own sake would be deeply immoral. I don’t get what you’re saying, otherwise – whatever the reasons, another high-profile Republican ditching Bush’s unpopular war is big news, regardless of how it’s spun.