With Iraq making the network news every night, regularly as the lead story, most people would assume that there are scores of intrepid  journalists embedded with the troops, reporting from the front lines of the War on Terror.

Most people would be wrong.

According to Pajamas Media, there are nine. And four of them work for the US armed forces:

Here’s the chart (CLICK HERE TO VIEW) showing who the nine embedded reporters were covering all of Iraq on 9/19/2006. You’ll see that of those 9 reporters, 3 were from the Armed Forces’ Stars & Stripes, 1 from AFN (Armed Force Network), 1 from the Charlotte Observer, 1 from the BBC, 1 from the AP, 1 from RAI, and 1 from Polish Radio. All the rest of the “coverage” of the Iraq war on that day came from reporters hunkered down in the hotels and other locations under the rubric “Baghdad News Bureaus.” So the next time you hear the phrase “reported first hand,” you might well ask, “Whose hand and where was it?”

This explains a great deal, especially the lack of any conflicting viewpoints in the American mainstream media. In a war, an unbiased press corps can be expected to broadcast a diversity of stories, some of which will directly contradict each other as they compete for exclusive news.

But when the number of reporters actively covering a major conflict can be counted on one hand...