I'm late because this is hard

Talking about the Iraq War makes me angry.

I don't hate the war, per se. I could care less about the war. We went over there, unprovoked, sure, but we did a good thing in getting rid of Saddam. He killed men -- then charged the family thousands of dollars for the bullet used to do it. He and his sons raped and killed, then punished anyone who talked about it. At that point, we had done something that made the world better.

I just hate that we can't cover the war without being crucified as pushing a liberal agenda. Things are bad. Truthfully, objectively, honestly, things are bad. "The good things" that are happening over there are few and far between, and no one -- Iraqi or otherwise -- can get too excited about clean water or a friggin' playground when it's offset by the rape of a 14-year-old and the murder of her family. Or an Abu Ghraib. Or any story with a lead like this: "Cpl Donald Payne, 35, of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, pleaded guilty to the charge at the start of a court martial of seven British soldiers accused of beating and killing Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, while he was held by UK troops in Basra in September 2003."

In my humble opinion, that's on par with a taped beheading. Hell, maybe even worse: at least the guys doing he beheading were making a statement; our guys are just sadistic for the fun of it. But that's neither here nor there...

I hate that the idea of a liberal media bias is so ingrained that people ignore blatant attempts to skew the news the other way. I hate that whatever people choose to believe about the war, they can continue to do so because they can choose who gives them their "news" based on their war views.

It makes what we do inconsequential. Completely inconsequential. The only thing we can do that won't immediately get politicized and spun is the daily numbers report. Oh, wait. We can't do that. Running the numbers of American dead is only delivering the bad news, and that is unacceptable.

The worst part about it is that I see no end. The information explosion has required a way to filter through it, and a political filter is one popular option the media has embraced. It's easy to throw out words we've learned in school: "only run it if it's balanced!" "only show the objective stuff!" But it's much more complicated than that. Do you run one "good" story for every "bad"? What counts as good? What's bad? Maybe we even have a sliding scale -- one troop homecoming equals one car bombing, or some such, whereas the story quoted above requires seventeen elementary school openings to balance it out.

Maybe we take another approach, with each news agency sending two reporters -- one to cover exclusively bad news, and one to cover exclusively good.

Genius. If we take that approach, we'll be back to the good ol' days before we know it. I promise.

No... there is no going back. We're here now. And we're going to be here for a looong time.

I have no interest in war coverage, or even political coverage, for exactly this reason. I don't want to cover anything where the truth is biased.

The truth is something that doesn't require balance; balance comes in when the truth isn't clear.