ASSOCIATED PRESS: Sharp Drop Seen in US Deaths in Iraq. The Bush Administration’s secrecy plan is a miserable failure!

But Jules Crittenden has some thoughts on reporting.

UPDATE: Still more thoughts on the press coverage from Dean Barnett:

YOU’D THINK THIS would be a big story. After all, the mainstream media makes such a show of “supporting the troops” at every turn, you’d think it would rush to report the amazing story of our soldiers accomplishing what many observers declared “impossible” and “unwinnable” not so long ago.

It hasn’t worked out that way. When General Ricardo Sanchez (ret.) addressed the situation in Iraq on October 11, he proclaimed that America was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.” Naturally, the “nightmare” quote wound up in the first paragraph of the New York Times report on Sanchez’s comments. What didn’t find its way into the Times’ report was any context of what’s going on in Iraq. The “nightmare” assessment would have been a whole lot more fitting when Sanchez was helping run the show in Iraq in 2006 than it is today. . . .

WHAT’S MOST FRUSTRATING about the press’s reporting about Iraq is that you just know the next time something goes wrong, be it a car bomb slipping through or a mishap involving American soldiers, that story will get above-the-fold treatment in America’s major dailies. . . . Of course, there is nothing wrong with the media reporting the bad news out of Iraq. Indeed, it’s their duty. But there is something profoundly wrong with the media reporting the bad news while disingenuously ignoring the progress we’ve made, progress that’s only been made because of the sacrifices of 160,000 American soldiers.

Yes, it’s almost as if undermining morale on the domestic front were a key goal. When the history of media reportage on this war is written, it will not be kind.