Tet redux

update: Allahpundit has the video of Pam Hess blasting her media colleagues on Reliable Sources. (Little did I know when I watched Kurtz this morning that this story was going to get such play.)
The surge is, obviously, a Tet moment. Jim Rutenberg, writing in today’s Times, quotes an administration official:

“The president gets it,” said a senior administration official involved in the planning. “He knows public opinion is not going to change until those images on the evening news improve.”

Surprisingly, there’s a reporter willing to go on the record on television to say that the media should be doing its part. Apparently stunning Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz, UPI’s Pentagon correspondent Pam Hess said:

[T]here are two kinds of stories about Iraq. There’s the accountability story which we’re all obsessed with covering. And the president’s even added some fuel to the fire by admitting he made a mistake, although not delineating what those mistakes are. But then there is the success stories.

We’re not writing those. We’re not asking those hard questions. We’re only talking about accountability. And again, it’s the country that’s paying.

Earlier on the same program Hess said that the American press was having so much fun covering the politics that it is missing the real story:

What we’re not asking is actually the central question. We’re getting distracted by the shiny political knife fight.

What we need to be asking is, what happens if we lose? And no one will answer that question. If we lose, how are we going to mitigate the consequences of this?

It’s so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It’s on the cover of “The New York Times” today, what this means for the ‘08 election. But we’re not asking the central national security question [i.e., "what happens if we lose?" --ed.], because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you’re carrying Bush’s water. There are national security questions at stake, and we’re ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.

I have a different term for this: I call it media complicity in jihad. I’ve been writing about it since the disgraceful coverage of the release of journalist Jill Carroll.