With respect to Paul Wolfowitz’s testimony before the House Armed Services committee, Editor and Publisher sez:

Gaining less attention was that he [Wolfowitz] identified the media as part of the problem in Iraq. “Frankly, part of our problem,” Wolfowitz said, “is a lot of press are afraid to travel very much. So they sit in Baghdad, and they publish rumors.”

Snarky question: why might they be afraid to travel? Snarkier question: “rumors” like the presence of WMD in Iraq immediately prior to the March 2003 start of the war?

I guess this all revolves around whether one believes Iraq is a “quagmire” or not. Cases to be made on both sides, I suppose, but there seems to be this attitude among the Administration that when the media reports that things are not all puppies and butterflies in the Middle East, it [the media] is somehow fostering an untrue belief that we are mired down. An If-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us mentality, even. Dangerous to get locked into that kind of thinking, n’est-pas?