Good column by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (USA, Ret.) in the New York Post on media bias in Iraq. He makes what seems to me to be some elementary points about media objectivity.

The media are not detached from all responsibility for the events they cover. A journalist will tell you - sometimes sincerely - that he or she only reports the facts. That's never quite the truth. And it's often an outright lie.

Even the best journalists must choose among the facts to form their reports. Ethical reporters do strive for accuracy. But phony efforts to provide "balanced coverage" - to report the mass-murderer's side of the story with evenhanded sympathy - skew reality. Struggling to be fair to the viciously unfair is a sign of moral weakness, not objectivity.

Still worse, the competition for headlines drives journalists to report only those tiny slivers of ground-truth that qualify as "news." Setbacks make the cut. Successes don't.

Call me a nasty Postmodernist, but this has sort of been the, uh, common level of opinion in historical studies for about twenty years. You "must choose among the facts" to form your "report" of the past. But journalists, so politically liberal, are a bunch of ultra-conservatives when it comes to their epistemology, that is, their philosophy of how things can be known. It's an interesting mix; and a dangerous one. Because it means they are without any humility, intellectual or otherwise if they really believe that they are offering the cut-and-dried truth.

But of course Peters is talking about something else, ultimately, like why the occupation of Iraq is going well. Really.