Alas, America's reporting establishment, like its academic and cultural establishments, is hugely, overwhelmingly "blue state." It tends not to trust those who act in behalf of an administration -- George W. Bush's -- whose policies they fault almost across the board.
Yes, one can too easily generalize about these things. There has been first-rate reporting -- and first-rate, pro-American soldier reporting -- about Iraq. It should be added that our honorable profession, with its First Amendment commission, is in the news business, not the business of shilling for whoever happens to run the government at the moment.
It ill behooves the media all the same, for its own sake as well as the country's, to pretend that the American war effort (this includes prisoner interrogation) is a thing to be covered with fine "impartiality," like the NBA playoffs. As we see this week, consequences flow from different modes of presentation.
The nature of the war -- a battle against faceless terrorism instead of enemy armies -- changes the nature of the job. The same for the seeming inexhaustibility of the present enemy. On and on this enterprise goes; where it stops, nobody knows.
Factor all that into the equation and still excuses aren't possible for a media establishment that displays, through what it tells and what it omits to tell, its dark suspicions of the policy to which its country has committed itself.
So Newsweek "regrets" having gotten "part" of its Guantanamo story wrong! It's a start, no doubt. But, oh, the cost of it in terms we haven't begun to tote up.