Jason van Steenwyck is unique in that his dayjob is as a reporter but he's also a reservist officer and just got back from a 1 yr tour in Iraq... He brings forward this example of reportage bias from a front page article in the NYT -

I'm trying to contain myself reading this abominable piece of tripe from the New York Times.

WASHINGTON, June 12 — The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

... it's a fine example of how wrong you can be without committing a single factual error.

And how wrong is the NYT?   Well as Steenwyck educates us -

...There's no mention whatsoever of maneuver warfare theory, of OODA-loops, of the ideas of Col. John Boyd.

But it is the theory of maneuver warfare which lays out the very foundations upon which the decision to make the strikes were built.

In maneuver warfare theory, it is not neccessary to kill the HVTs in order to have the desired effect on the battlefield. It's nice, sure, but it's not neccessary in order for the strikes to be successful. We target key individuals and headquarters facilities NOT so much to kill, but to disrupt the enemy's decision-making process....

(read the rest)

It's classic press bias that accusations made by organizations like Human Rights Watch against the US are reproduced verbatim while the NYT reporters didn't spend one iota of effort to learn / report about maneuver warfare theory - pretty sad given this was a piece about, well, warfare theory.    When you get into the next level of detail, you realize that this strategy was actually tactically optimal.    But the NYT presents the the whole thing as one big ass failure. 

What makes me really angry is that info from folks like Steenwyck would have led to an unabashedly more informative AND interesting article.    Of course, it would detract from the wanton violence subtext a bit and might even make it appear that some intelligent stuff actually happened during the war (and we can't have that).

Idiots.