Dean Barnett notes:

In my Saturday post on Peggy Noonan, I wrote that I agreed with Peggy that the President’s “frequent inability to communicate and his constant inability to persuade” was both an irritant and a major problem. For some reason, many commenters and a certain hysterical blogger seemed to miss that paragraph and thought that I declared criticizing the president to be strictly off limits – such people will have to learn to read more closely or others might begin to question their intellectual rigor and honesty. Regardless, the fact that the President at this point in time can’t get through to the American people is hardly debatable. However history remembers George W. Bush, it won’t be as The Great Communicator II.

But Winds Of Change writes that on the other side of the aisle, today's media lacks the ability to communicate as well, except in shop-worn cliches that lack any sort of context:

Words like "neo-conservative," "civil war," WMD," "democracy," "treason" inhabit the core of the public discussion about Iraq -- and no two people who use them daily can agree on what they mean. Are 20-year-old Sarin gas artillery shells WMDs? Is Dick Cheney a neo-conservative? Is Iran a democracy?

Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a "grim milestone," by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliche of local journalism since, "Rain couldn't dampen the spirits/enthusiasm of _____ graduates of _____ high school during last night's commencement ceremony as they looked to the future and pondered the past."

It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired ("After days of intense searching by ground and air, U.S. forces on Saturday found the bodies of two soldiers missing north of Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war topped the grim milestone of 200 ..." -- Associated Press, June 29, 2003). I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.

Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a "grim milestone?" Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP's preferred 200) as the benchmark for "grim milestones," you had a grim milestone every five days during America's involvement in World War II with nary a "grim milestone" headline to show for it.

Update: Hugh Hewitt grades Tim Russert's performance on Meet The Press yesterday:

Tim Russert is by far the best of the MSM hosts, but that's just not saying much. Not asking four senior senators about Iranian forces in Iraq and Iranian weaponry killing Americans, and to leave largely unexplored the real possibility of post-withdrawal blood-letting on a scale that dwarfs the violence today and which returns Iraq to the violence on a scale of the worst days of Iraq is media malpractice. Imagine interviewing Stanley Baldwin in 1936 and finding time for one or two questions about Hitler, and then following with four MPs and discussing only Spain and Ethiopia, and not Germany.

The MSM is fixated on Bush, and not the war or our enemies. A decade from now --or even sooner-- the collapse of the media's responsibility to at least mention to the public the scale of the looming danger will be obvious.

More: Related thoughts, here.

Meanwhile, AP illustrates Winds Of Change's charges perfectly, on a story that doesn't even involve Iraq (unless you're Alec Baldwin, of course).