More on the MSM misreporting

Steve Schippert over at The Tank has more on the misreporting of the Iraq Prospectives Project with his post Cherry-picking Intelligence: Saddam's Iraq and Terrorism

• Permit me, please, to ask a very basic and fundamental question that must be answered:

  Are we, the United States, fighting a War on Terror, or are we just fighting a War on Al-Qaeda Senior Leadership?

  Answering this question would go a long way toward unspinning and unpacking what most Americans probably see as a dizzying contrast in reporting. Case in point: Consider the headlines that followed the disclosure of the latest Iraq Perspectives Project analyzing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi documents and other intelligence captured in Iraq.

  ABC: Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda
  CNN: Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda not linked, Pentagon says
  New York Times: Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie
  Washington Post: Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link
  AFP: No link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda: Pentagon study
  McClatchy: Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida

  The headlines and the narrative dictated by the bodies of the stories hover over a single sentence in the Executive Summary, which reads:

  "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."

  The journalists cherry-picked a single sentence out of a 94-page report and have written multitudes of stories on it. One can question whether some of the writers even read the report beyond that line, which appears in the second paragraph.