Time to include Laura Ingraham in the ranks of those Bush Kultists suggesting that an imbalanced presentation of the war in Iraq has had quantifiable effects, from driving public opinion at home to dampering the morale of our soldiers abroad. 

And Ingraham isn’t the only one.  From USATODAY:

As they begin a fourth year covering the war in Iraq, journalists there face increasing threats to their safety and increasing criticism of their work.

It started as arguably the best-covered war in history: Hundreds of reporters traveled with the military as it invaded Iraq, and then hundreds more moved freely around the country as troops secured Baghdad. Today, it has become for some journalists the least-covered war.

Newspapers and other media have cut the number of reporters in the war zone. The reporters who remain in Iraq find leaving their hotels or rental houses difficult for fear of being killed or kidnapped.

To get to the news, they generally must either “embed” with U.S. or Iraqi forces, work the phones from their hotels or houses, send Iraqi staff to events or make carefully planned reporting trips protected by hired guards.

Meanwhile, high-profile critics are stepping up their complaints about the media’s work. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, long critical of what he sees as overly negative reporting, told reporters this month: “From what I’ve seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation.”

President Bush said Tuesday, “For every act of violence there is encouraging progress in Iraq that’s hard to capture on the evening news.”

“Have we undercovered the good news?” asks John Burns, Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times. “We probably have. But there’s nothing willful about it. I would enter a plea of mitigation that we are overstretched.”

That puts reporters in a difficult position in terms of choosing which events to cover.

[My emphasis]

CNN’s Nic Robertson argues that the bad news and violence is “the prevailing information,” which explains the prominence of negative coverage—and the rest of the USATODAY story is a series of mediacentric explanations for the way reporting in Iraq is being done, and why it looks the way it does (a cut in numbers of foreign journalists in country, the refusal of the US military to allow pics of coffins (?), the “growing danger” to journalists, etc).

But reading between the lines, what is evident is that the few journalists reporting from Iraq tend to report from their hotels in Baghdad and project their (perfectly reasonable fears) onto their dispatches.  Which, while perhaps subjectively accurate, does not provide their readerships with anything but insight into the reporters’ personal conditions at the expense of the larger context of how Iraq is coming together— a point Ingraham made forcefully earlier this week on the “Today Show.”

And it is this criticism that is beginning to take root with many in the American public, and could (should media outlets begin to feel the pressure), ensure more balance in the reporting—as this Newsbusters story, “The Ingraham Effect,” suggests.  The piece notes a change in the tone of coverage on NBC’s morning show in light of Ingrahams recent spirited “Today Show” appearance, wherein she took NBC reporter Richard Engel to task for his balcony and Green Zone reporting.

The beginning of a trend?  I couldn’t say—and some reporters are already beginning to play the victims, accusing President Bush of “attacking the media” (polished silverplated elitist pot meet kettle).

But yesterday, the wife of a military reporter from Iraq received a standing ovation when she asked the President why the media concentrates only on the bad news coming out of Iraq, and why people in the US can’t seem to get news of all the positive accomplishes that her husband documented during his time in Iraq.

It seems to be fashionable among blogs on the anti-war left (and some on the anti-war right) to suggest that the tenor of US and international western reporting has had no appreciable effect on what they call the Iraq “debacle”.  But such an argument fails to explain why, in a November 2005 poll, 57% of the American public believed Bush “deliberately mislead us into war.”

My thesis?  That’s what they’ve been told, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again—often times by those who had access to the raw intelligence data and who themselves voted for the war, gave speeches hyping Saddam’s weapons capabilites, and were around before Bush to support the Clinton Iraq Regime Change legislation.

One explanation for this rhetorical attack on the President’s credibility goes like this:  the Dems, despite having access to intelligence, were fooled by the manipulative hard sell of the Administration (which didn’t take much, given that many of them had already been making the same arguments the President was making long before he made them).  That is, they voted to give the President authorization to go to war despite being, by their own admissions, uninformed.  Which hardly inspires confidence.

The second explanation—and the one I lean toward—is that, per Rockefeller’s memo (which I posted on here), partisan Democrats, using the cover of a sensationalist and ideological press, actively and intentionally sought to weaken the President for political gain, the consequences of their rhetoric on the war effort in Iraq be damned.

I’ve been arguing forcefully for the last few weeks that we need to concentrate our efforts now on winning the war at home.  Perhaps we’re beginning to see a bit of a pushback from a public slowly awakening from a one-sided information slumber.

(h/t AJ Strata, who has more)