Greg Sargent at The American Prospect reports that it's been four days since the Military Times released its poll of active duty troops, which found among military personnel greater opposition to Bush's "surge" proposal to escalate the war than there is support. Yet there hasn't been a single mention of this poll in The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press, as best as I can determine. A Reuters story today contains a couple of brief paragraphs on the poll in a story that's mainly about something else, but the story contains no mention of the "surge" number. (The Reuters story is linked to by the Times's and the Post's web site, but only in a long list of Reuters stories. Nothing about it has appeared in the print edition of either paper and neither has done any independent reporting on it). CNN has obliquely mentioned the poll a couple of times, according to a Nexis search, but also failed to mention the "surge" stat.
Here's why this is an astonishingly derelict performance: These very same news orgs all lavished extensive coverage on another, completely unscientific measure of the troops' opinions of a "surge." A couple of weeks back, Defense Secretary Robert Gates convened a photo-op sitdown with around a dozen troops to listen to their opinions. Myseriously [sic], all of those assembled agreed that they wanted more troops. The thoughts of this handful of soldiers was granted extensive coverage by The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.
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