This I can't fault the media for - way back when I was 10, I wrote to David Brinkley and asked him why the news broadcasts were about bad news. At the time I was bothered because my grandfather had died - a survivor of the Bataan death march and innumerable atrocities as a POW, and a hero to many - but while I knew he wasn't going to get a blip on the news, during that cycle some rather awful people had met their end - and THEY made the news.
Brinkley told me - after reassuring me that my grandfather was in fact, heroic - that it is the nature of the news to report bad news. As he said it, if a plane or train arrives on time, that is not news, but if one crashes, that IS. He also added that they do *try* to balance their coverage.
So what do they say? Iraq - a lot better than you think? There's no doubt that if say, FOX tried to report good news from Iraq, it'd be touted as propaganda.
It's also the nature of the war that it's hard to assess how well it's going. It's not WW2 where the measure of the progress of the war was how close are we to Berlin, and have they captured Hitler yet? THAT part of the Iraq War ended five years ago. We no longer care if they've rolled into Baghdad yet, and most Americans are not the slightest bit aware of what the current campaigns are.