One Nation, Under Informed

Well, didn't we do gang-busters in Iraq, huh? I saw on CNN that a train was up and running again in Baghdad commandeered by a conductor smiling with his thumbs up. Schools are opening and the Iraqi people are liberated and naming their kids "Dubya." Democracy is just around the corner with fair elections and a sunny new day is coming when all Iraqis will love America and watch Fox News and dine in style on a "Whopper" with cheese and onion rings while they watch and wait for Wal-Mart to come to town. I just get such a warm and squishy, patriotic feeling everyday as I open my Gannett owned local newspaper (all four pages of it) and get the latest news of our victory. Boy, those Hussein people were really mean and nasty, weren't they? Good thing we got 'em, huh? We are so cool and so powerful! What a great war, I mean, hardly anybody got hurt or anything.

And then - I still get shivers when I think about it - that magic moment. Commander in Chief, George W. came swooping down on that landing deck of the Lincoln to proclaim the end of the war! Oh, every time I think about it my socks just start rolling up and down. And the press just couldn't get enough of just how good he looked in that flight suit! Tom Cruise, eat your heart out!

Kind of makes you wanna throw up, doesn't it?
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  thanks to BookNotes

Embed Catches Heat
TV Sanitized the Iraq Conflict, But a Paper Gets the Hate Mail

There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.
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  thanks to BookNotes

If Print News Were Like TV News

If print news were like TV news, it would read something like this:

Hello, and welcome to the column. Those of you who are regular readers know that we write about news, and so we shall. Coming up later in this paragraph, a sentence ending with a preposition. Also in this report, startling news about secondhand smoke. And still to come, we ask the important question: "automatic weapons -- can your children still afford them?" All that, coming up after the break, when we bring you more news you can't get enough of.
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  thanks to the bitter shack of resentment