The War Waged by Agenda Journalists Continues – UPDATED!

Selective reporting.

It’s at the heart of agenda journalism. Here’s how it works:

You start with a conclusion, like say “the Iraq war is a failure”, and then you seek out facts that support the conclusion, while omitting facts that contradict the story line.

We know with near certainty that selective journalism is practised with the Iraq war coverage generally, by following this simple axiom:

– there exist negative stories out of Iraq: bombings, violence
– there exist positive stories out of Iraq: re-irrigation for Marsh Arabs, Kurdistan’s relative success, repatriation of millions of Iraqis who fled Saddam’s regime
– but only the negative stories are told, and they’re told to us daily.

This week we saw another explicit example – a selective leak, specifically tailored to only tell the negative while refraining from showing the positive. As with the macro-level coverage of the war generally, this latest leak is being presented as if it’s the whole story.

The war waged by agenda journalists continues.

UPDATE! President Bush has decided to declassify the report to let the American people read it and decide for themselves: (Fox News)

Bush said he was declassifying part of a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last April because he wanted people to be able to read the conclusions without filters that “create confusion in the minds of the American people.”