A Turning Point on Iraq

The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei: Polls show "a growing number of Americans are questioning the trustworthiness of you and this White House. Does that concern you?"

Hearst columnist Helen Thomas: "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true."

In his CBS interview with Cheney, Bob Schieffer said: "Let me ask you about this charge of incompetence, because we hear that not just about Iraq, but we hear it more -- and being raised sometimes by members of your own party on a variety of issues -- the bumbling after Katrina, the Harriet Miers nomination, the failure to see the political implications of the Dubai Ports deal."

When the networks did their three-year anniversary pieces, reciting the mounting death toll, the picture that emerged was bleak. NBC's Richard Engel in Baghdad: "Since the U.S. invasion, there has not been a single day without mortar fire, car bombings or IED attacks."

ABC's Dan Harris in Baghdad: "The situation for many here has worsened. Since the war, millions of Iraqis no longer have drinkable water. In Baghdad, there's electricity for fewer than eight hours a day, compared to 18 before. And in a country with so much oil, today there are unfathomably long gas lines."

But ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas reminded viewers that before her co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, was injured by a roadside bomb in late January, he did a story on a thriving Baghdad ice cream shop, and that her December trip to Iraq included a piece on a ballet school.

Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio talk show host who recently spent eight days in Iraq, says some soldiers complained to her that their views, which were mixed, aren't being reflected by the media.

"It's not about painting a rosy picture," she says. "It's not about putting all good news out there. It's about there being some context. It's not just explosions every day, and that is primarily what is seen, in snapshots and flashes. And that does over time cement the public's view that this is irretrievably a disaster and the whole nation is in flames."

When news organizations focus overwhelmingly on insurgent attacks, Ingraham says, "it begins to look like you're invested in America's defeat."

That sounds like political overstatement. But if journalists seem far more aggressive these days, it may be because their performance contrasts sharply with the period after the Sept. 11 attacks and in the run-up to the war, when news organizations have conceded they did an inadequate job examining the administration's WMD claims.

"We were attacked," Auletta says. "We are citizens. We felt as vulnerable as our leaders in Washington. Bush and the government got more of a free pass."

The record shows that administration charges that reporters in Iraq are ignoring signs of progress are not true, although most journalists say the dangerous conditions make it difficult to talk to ordinary Iraqis. But sometimes the unrelenting violence has a way of intruding on the news agenda.