Small Wars Journal has two excellent postings up that show how shoddy/biased/incompetent (pick one) that US journalism has become.  The first posting is a response to an article published in Newsweek magazine concerning the human terrain teams in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Dear Editors,

Having long been an admirer of Newsweek, I found your failure to fact check the story by Dan Ephron & Silvia Springs entitled "A gun in one hand, a pen in the other" (21 April issue) completely shocking. One naturally expects more from Newsweek than such sloppy journalism.

Below you will find a list of factual corrections and some more general points about the article.

FACTUAL ERRORS: [Small Wars Journal]

Read the rest to see all the factual errors in the Newsweek article which is really shocking, especially when the magazine was notified of some of the errors and decided to run the article anyway.  Human terrain teams is something that has been covered before here on Forward Deployed and continues to be a topic of continued distortion by the media. 

The second posting is a criticism of a Miami Herald article that claims a "Pentagon study" claimed the war in Iraq is a "debacle".  The author of this study provides the context of the report and explains this report is not a "Pentagon study" as the newspaper claims:

The Miami Herald story ("Pentagon Study: War is a ‘Debacle’ ") distorts the nature of and intent of my personal research project. It was not an NDU study, nor was it a Pentagon study. Indeed, the implication of the Herald story was that this study was mostly about current events. Such is not the case. It was mainly about the period 2002-04. The story also hypes a number of paragraphs, many of which are quoted out of context. The study does not "lay much of the blame" on Secretary Rumsfeld for problems in the conduct of the war, nor does it say that he "bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff." It does not single out "Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hadley" for criticism. Here is a fair summary of my personal research, which formally is NDU INSS Occasional Paper 5, "Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath." [Small Wars Journal]

Make sure to read the rest of the response that shreds the Miami Herald report. 

Both of these media distortions just further validates my view that the media is more interested in creating narratives and validating stereotypes instead of publishing facts and truths about what is really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This all leads back to the question of whether it is shoddy, biased, or incompetent journalism that is responsible for these flawed articles.  Once again I’ll let you choose which one it is. 

Further Reading: Fake but Accurate, the New Standard of Journalism Ethics