Swarmer: A Few More Observations

Following up on this weekend’s posts:

> On Sunday’s Reliable Sources, The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle said: “It’s telling that it was a bigger deal on the television journalists in — than it was on print journalists. If you looked at the morning papers…” “It was not on anybody’s front page,” Howard Kurtz noted. Cottle continued: “What happens is, when you have good video, you go with it. And I think the Pentagon knew this, and they put out those great pictures, and so it looked compelling, even if kind of the news value turned out to be not so hot.”

> Andrew Tyndall e-mails: “At least NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski got Operation Swarmer in context on Thursday’s NBC Nightly News: ‘…some Pentagon and military officials admit that the overall scope may have been overblown a bit in an effort to show that US military and Iraqi security forces are aggressively working to root out the enemy. The proof will come over the next few days when we see how many of those enemy are actually rounded up.'”

> “On Friday morning’s Fox & Friends the anchors were talking about a new poll on the President’s handling of Iraq. They kept stressing that it was taken before Operation Swarmer. Thought it was kinda funny,” an e-mailer says.