At the University of California Berkley there was a gathering of Iraq war correspondents aimed at addressing complaints about media coverage of the war in Iraq.

You won't believe some of the things that were said:

Meanwhile [NYT Bureau Cheif John] Burns, who began reporting from Iraq long before the U.S.-led invasion, said that he had at first believed that Iraqis would be better off if the violent tyrant Saddam Hussein were toppled. He had been "mesmerized by Saddam Hussein's brutality into looking through a narrow glass," he admitted, and had "missed the fractured society beneath the tyranny," a society that is now looking as if it is about to degenerate into a bloody, decades-long, unresolvable civil war.

Wow.

This from an "objective" reporter whose reporting, we are supposed to believe, is an accurate representation of what is going on in Iraq.

And then there was this from a Washington Post journalist:

Jackie Spinner, Washington Post staff writer and author of "Tell Them I Didn't Cry," an account of a year spent in Baghdad starting in May 2004, disagreed that reporters in Iraq are prevented from telling both sides. "I think we're getting 90 percent of the story," she said. When disbelieving guffaws rang out from the audience, she retorted, "Excuse me, have you been there?"

Members of the audience may or may not have been in Iraq, but the troops sure have and they, almost to a man from what I've observed, seem to think that the media is getting just about every story about Iraq wrong.