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# Posted 1:03 AM by Ariel David Adesnik

THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET: Kevin Drum says that things in Iraq are shot to all hell. Moreover, this is proof that all those who criticized the media for manufacturing bad news about the occupation -- Who, me? -- should admit that they were wrong and the media was right.

Well, I'm going to hold off for now, first and foremost because I have an Arabic test at 9AM tomorrow. But also because there are some broader questions that I want to take the time to think over.

First of all, can what is going wrong in Iraq now be traced to what the media asserted was going wrong in Iraq all along? Over the past few months, the media has mainly been saying that the United States' great mistake was not to take Ayatollah Sistani's demands more seriously earlier on, since he commands overwhelming support among Iraq's majority Shi'ites. Did American hesitance to compromise with Sistani increase Moqtada Sadr's support, or did the media simply drop the ball on this one?

Second, what will happen if the media's most persistent critics go back and read the specific stories that we criticized for being one-sided or pessimistic? Do current events demonstrate that the flaws we detected in those stories were actual strenghts? Or are such flaws still present and unrelated to recent violence?

My guess is that I actually will go back and do some of the research necessary to answer these questions, if only because I'm a little taken aback by the sneering tone of the almost always affable Calpundit. What will I find? Who knows.

UPDATE: Compared to Kevin, Matt Yglesias is rather sanguine about today's violence. On the other hand, Matt has some tough but fair comments about a recent gauntlet I threw his way on the media bias issue. To clarify, I don't believe that moderate liberals see the media as fundamentally objective. Rather, they see the media's subjectivity as politically neutral. In contrast, Matt asserts that the media (inadvertently?) favors conservatives.

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