The dog that doesn't bark gets no press

Jack Kelly reports on the reporting of matters in Iraq, noting that the MSM coverage gets a D+ from Bill Roggio.

Actor and antiwar activist Richard Belzer said he knows more about the war in Iraq than do U.S. servicemen in Iraq because he "reads 20 newspapers a day." But 20 biased, shallow and incomplete accounts don't add up to the truth.

Kelly appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show this afternoon to expand on his column, followed by Michael Yon. One of Kelly's points was that hardly anyone among the MSM's big guns have had any military experience or knows how to judge progress or lack thereof. Hard to do when you only attend press briefings and don't leave your hotel. Even those who embed with the troops can't really evaluate the effect of a single fire fight on the entire picture across the country:

[The] reporting shows first a monumental ignorance of military affairs. As Bill pointed out, there's commentary larded in with the reporting, events are looked at in isolation, you don't get reporting of events in context. To give you an illustration, there were two news stories day that made news. One was this terrorist attack on a prison, an Iraqi prison in Muqdadiyah.

HH: Yup.

JK: It got a lot of attention.

HH: Yup.

JK: The more significant thing was the dog that didn't bark, that the Shiia pilgrimage into Karbala, on this Shiia holiday, passed peacefully, that there were no terrorist assault, there was no sign of civil war. That got very little attention.

HH: That's a annual and very massive march, is it not?

JK: It is indeed. There are hundreds of thousands of people that participate. And they walk hundreds of miles in many instances. The Northeast portion of Sadr City largely empties out to march down to Karbala, which is about 80 miles away.

HH: Whoa. That's a big walk.

JK: It is indeed.

HH: Okay. You're right, though. It's also a huge target.

JK: It is a huge target, and there was a lot of security for it, and there was one incident yesterday where several pilgrims were shot by drive-by shooting, like a gangland shooting in L.A. But as far as I know, that was it.