Those who, on LancasterOnline, worry that the media in this county has been manipulated in terms of how it/we have reported the convention center issue might enjoy reading Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com (you’ve got to sit through the commercial, well worth the wait); he consistently addresses the same subject on a broader level, and had a piece yesterday that is scores a direct hit, I think, in terms of how the pundit class reports on Iraq:

Is there a single principle of good journalism which Klein, in his short piece, failed to violate? The first sentence declares that “there is good news from Iraq, believe it or not,” and that is all based on the claim that “the level of violence [in Anbar] has plummeted in recent weeks.” And how does Klein know that?

A senior U.S. military official told me — confirming reports from several other sources — that there have been “a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there.”

As always, the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?

That was one of the principal though-still-unlearned lessons of the Judy Miller Saga: when a journalist does nothing but mindlessly repeat the claims of government sources which are completely consistent with — or designed to bolster — the claims being made by the administration itself out in the open, the journalist is doing nothing more than turning himself into a willing propaganda tool. Again, what conceivable journalistic justification is there for granting anonymity to government sources to recite the Government Line?

And in an update, he reprints - again from Time Magazine - graphs from various stories during the 1960s in which government officials reassure the public how well things are going in Vietnam.

The more things change…