tl;dr The ground truth is NOTHING like what you see in the MSM. I fought in Iraq as a paratrooper mostly in Baghdad from '04 to '05. While there I was really surprised by the reporting I saw. We had CNN in our hooch (paid Hadji to hook it up). We had satellite Internet (again paid Hadji for it) and I read the NY Times. The reporting there could not have been further from reality. We used to scratch our heads at the reporting each morning on the day prior in Baghdad. It was like they were reporting from a different planet. You should not be surprised that the ground truth is wildly different from what is being reported. My first briefing when I got on the ground in 2004 was that we were past a simple insurgency and now in a small scale civil war that we were trying to stop from becoming a full scale humanitarian crisis. I recall a lot of reporting and very brainy discussion about the insurgency at that time but I don't recall the civil war entering that discussion until late 2005 when I got back to the states. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan most of reporters don't go out without ISAF patrols because that would not be very safe, it was the same in Iraq. This drastically alters the story you get. On the flip side, I'm pleasantly surprised by the courage displayed by some of the PBS Frontline reporters and the places they've gone. I love Frontline. As they say, America isn't at war America is at the shopping mall. The US Army is at war.