Cursor's Media Patrol - 10/17/05

Back to Iraq's Chris Allbritton says "color me skeptical" after finding 'Curious numbers in Ninevah' that Juan Cole calls "counter-intuitive," and the Los Angeles Times quotes a Sunni Arab spokesman as saying: "If 95% ... can't stop the constitution, then who can?"

Cole tells the Washington Post that "This thing is an enormous fiasco ... and this result guarantees the guerrilla war will go on," and in a TomDispatch interview, he talks of media coverage that generates "an extremely persistent set of images that almost no actual information is able to make a dent in."

The New York Times finds that President Bush has changed his tone on Iraq, as "he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions," and Time profiles an insurgent 'Professor of Death' with similar expectations.

'Soldier Propagandist' After discovering that "pro-Bush rhetoric" from one of the U.S. soldiers who appeared in last week's teleconference with the president, "is sprinkled throughout the media in articles dating back to 2003," MediaCitizen asks: "how could one soldier get so much face time?"