Hume related that Koppel “spoke with real generosity about the American officers and enlisted men that he dealt with, and how able they were and how good they were and how effective they were. But he went out of his way to make a point of distinguishing between them and the policy makers in Washington. About the latter he said, “I’m very cynical, and I remain very cynical, about the reasons for getting into this war.”

It is altogether appropriate that journalists should pride themselves on being skeptical. That’s their job. But a cynic, as I understand it, is one who routinely attributes low or base motives to the actions of others—or at best, believes that every human action is motivated by self-interest. We’ve heard the popular definition of a cynic: one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Koppel speaks for many in the American media, and it’s a sad commentary on many of the people who purport to bring us the “news.”

Reading Hume’s comments reminded me of a more recent article by Dennis Prager (“Only those with beliefs can defeat those with beliefs,” TownHall.com, Oct. 7, 2003). The gist of his article was that there is a deep divide in this country between those who believe in something and those who apparently believe in nothing: “Faith in religion and in America explains much of the ideological division within America. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Condoleezza Rice are deeply religious, and the vast majority of deeply religious Americans support this administration and its foreign policy.”

Of course, religion is not the only kind of faith, as Prager points out: “Virtually all the non-religious supporters of President Bush’s war on the Islamist threat to liberty have a deep faith in the United States and in its mission to preserve liberty. . . . But in the modern West, hundreds of millions of people have no such faith in anything. . . . Their highest values are tolerance, health, pleasure, and not judging good and evil.”

And here is a telling and insightful statement: “They are deeply afraid of fervent believers in anything. And they especially fear American believers—i.e., believers in the Bible and in America.”

Is that what is wrong with our establishment media—fear? That may be part of it, but the whole truth is even worse. Reports are appearing in many places now about the corruption that has characterized much of the “reporting” from Iraq by American media personnel.

We learned some time back that CNN chief news executive, Eason Jordan, admitted his network had been withholding the truth about the horrors and atrocities of Saddam’s regime for years.

Now, John Burns, a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and also the Times’ Baghdad bureau chief, has written a book, Embedded, in which he describes the media’s performance in Iraq as “absolutely disgraceful. He says the vast majority of correspondents in prewar Iraq “played ball” with Saddam and deliberately downplayed the viciousness of the regime and the appalling human rights abuses inflicted on the Iraqi people. Burns characterized Saddam’s Iraq as “a grotesque charnel house” and a genuine threat to America. As a veteran foreign correspondent, Burns has been posted to such places as Mao’s China, Afghanistan and Bosnia, but he believes that with the possible exception of North Korea, Iraq as a terror state is in a class by itself: “Absolute evil,” he says. (Notra Trulock, “Media Muzzled on Iraq—But by Whom?”)

Accurate and honest reporting of what was going on in Iraq could (and probably would) have made a vast difference in what transpired in Iraq, in coalition planning for Saddam’s overthrow, in the world’s perception of the evils of Saddam’s regime, and even in the UN Security Council, which would have had little choice but to face the truth.

Instead, many reporters—particularly with BBC and CNN, according to Burns—were so concerned with protecting their news-gathering “access” that they were willing to conceal the very thing they were there to obtain. The irony of it is both fascinating and appalling.

Burns recounts the bribes paid to Iraqi information ministry officials in exchange for access and favorable treatment. Ann Garrels, NPR correspondent, confirms Burns’ account of the bribes in her new book on the war, Naked in Baghdad. A review of the book in USA Today cites one of Garrels’ examples, a mid-level bureaucrat who made at least $200,00 off his share of the bribes.

Burns’ comments about the disconnect between reality and reporting on Iraq are being borne out by others upon their return from information gathering tours in Iraq. John Leo (“Media reporting from Iraq is one-sided and flawed,” TownHall.com, Sept. 29, 2003) cites three such individuals.

Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) said he was impressed with the flexibility and innovation of the American military which, under one command alone, is engaged in 3,100 rebuilding projects in northern Iraq—“from soccer fields to schools to refineries, all good stuff, and that isn’t being reported.”

U.S. District Court Judge Don Walter of Shreveport, Louisiana, was vehemently anti-war before he took an assignment in Iraq to serve as an advisor on Iraq’s courts. Now he says we should have invaded sooner than we did to put a stop to the butchery and torture that the UN, France, and Russia knew about but were willing to tolerate for political and economic reasons (our emphasis).

Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall says negative media coverage is getting our troops killed in Iraq by encouraging Baathist holdouts to think they can drive the U.S. out of Iraq. Marshall was one of seven congressional representatives that recently returned from Iraq. Members of the group say that reporters have developed an overall negative tone and mind-set that concentrates primarily on attacks in which U.S. military are wounded or killed.

Marshall, who is a Vietnam veteran, attributes the disconnect between the reporting and the reality in Iraq partly to the fact that the 27 reporters left in Iraq are “all huddled in a hotel.”

A movement to get more balance in reporting from Iraq has been driven by two individuals in particular—Andrew Sullivan (AndrewSullivan.com) and law professor Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee (Instapundit.com). Both men are encouraging U.S. soldiers and others in Iraq to send in their own reports, which have generally been positive and hopeful.

It is an example once again of the “new” media going around the “old.” Thank goodness for conservative radio, some genuinely credible journalists, and the Internet.