John Roberts Tells Kurtz: Iraq Worse Than Media Shows

CNN's John Roberts, recently returned from a month-long visit to Iraq, was interviewed by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz for his CNN "Reliable Sources" program on Sunday. Much of the talk concerned media treatment of the war, starting with complaints by U.S. soldiers, and then the overall media coverage.

Roberts revealed that despite some charges to the contrary, military personnel did not have a problem with the coverage and, in fact, the situation on the ground is an "absolute mess," worse than the media has shown. "The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level," he said. "So, to some degree, what we're seeing is sanitized." (More)

John in DC, AmericaBlog: Bush, Rummy, Condi, Cheney, O'Reilly, Hannity and the rest of the pathetic Republican liars in Congress and beyond have repeatedly told the American people that Iraq is actually going much better than we see on TV. We see only see the bad stuff on TV, they tell us. The American media is liberal and biased, they refuse to tell Americans how good things really are in Iraq.

Fine. Then Iraq is really going great. I'm so glad. I guess we can expect victory any day now. And when we don't achieve victory, I want everybody who supported this war - everybody who attacked Democrats for saying years ago that this war was a huge mistake - to apologize publicly. Far too many Americans bought into the Republicans' BS talking points about Iraq. And now we're paying the price for it, in the lives of our soldiers, in the utter destruction of Iraq.

Americans need to wake up to the fact that their choices have consequences. The Republican party owns this war. They keep telling us that victory is the only option. Fine. Then it's their job to get us out of it and prove that victory really is still an option.

Joe in DC, AmericaBlog: Iraq's leaders are blaming politics for the violence that has overtaken their country. They mean Iraqi politics. But it was American politics that started this war in the first place. It was the George Bush/Karl Rove brand of fear politics and their willingness to exploit 9/11 that pushed for this debacle. And it has been the failure of America's Republican politicians to take the actions necessary over the past 3 1/2 years to quell the violence. The GOP let partisan politics prevent them from challenging and questioning the way the war was being directed. Their politics – and their political leadership – are responsible for this disaster.

Politics are to blame. But, it was George Bush's politics of lies and deceit that started this war in the first place. There is plenty of blame to go around in Iraq. But, the initial blame begins with the man who started this war and never had a plan to finish it: George W. Bush.

Speaking of the media, FYI: Yesterday on Fox News, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) “accused a Fox News anchor of conducting a skewed interview designed to make Democrats look bad.” Frank told Chris Wallace, “Everything [you say] is aimed at trying to put us in a kind of a bad light.” Asked how fair Fox is when compared to other news outlets, Frank said the network is “substantially worse.”