This blogger noticed something I missed in an article:

This article by John F. Burns is good. One line in it really stuck out to me, though. People have often wondered why the news stories from Iraq still read like they were vetted by the Iraqi Information Ministry. I know I've observed that they still seem that way. Well, if they do - it's because they are:

At the Palestine Hotel, where I was taunted in the last weeks of Mr. Hussein's terror by officials of his information ministry as "the most dangerous man in Iraq" because of my articles about the regime's brutality, some of the same Iraqis, who now work as interpreters for Western news bureaus, caution me against staying in the 16th-floor room I used to inhabit.

So our "free press" are so annoyed by and opposed to censorship that they're employing their own minders now that Saddam is no longer able to pay them. And we wonder why the quotes they get from Iraqis - who aren't stupid and do know who worked for the Ba'athist regime - tell the interpreters the things they do, and the interpreters then tell the reporters, who then report back to America in a certain tone. If we've been wondering why there is such a disconnect between what the news reports are saying about conditions and attitudes in Iraq, and what independent people who go there without hiring on ex-Iraqi Information Ministry minders to screen information for them say about Iraq, well now we know. The BBC, for example, I've long suspected that their "man on the street" quotes are really "Ba'athist on the street" interviews.