bet you didn’t know this!

Andrew Sullivan reports about a study (from Eastern Michigan University, not the University of Michigan as he writes) which shows—surprisingly— that Iraqis have grown increasingly secular and nationalistic since 2004.

  Sullivan writes:

[The results] seems to fly in the face of much evidence and reporting from Iraq in the past four years.

I say: what evidence?

What reporting?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, in a quarterly report published on May 25, found that, while Iraq war coverage “dwarfed” all other new topics in early 2007, almost none of it was about Iraq—it was mostly about Americans:

The majority of the war coverage, 55%, has been about the political debate back in Washington. Less than a third, 31%, has been focused on events in Iraq itself. And about half that coverage has been about American soldiers there.In all, just one in six stories about the war has been focused on Iraqis, Iraqi casualties or the internal political affairs of their country, the report finds, while more than eight in ten have focused primarily on Americans or American policy.

I don’t know if Iraqis are feeling more nationalistic—it sounds implausible, considering that a reported 2 million of them have fled the country, but what do I know. More to the point: what can we know, if our media do not report on what is happening on the ground in Iraq, to Iraqis?