I am currently on vacation in the UK, which means that I am getting to read the UK print newspapers. While many of the afflictions that the US print media suffer from also appear to have found their way into the UK media (an excessive reliance on tittle-tattle being one issue), it is still possible to find more incisive reporting on some world issues in the UK newspapers.
One are where the UK print media are doing a much better job of explaining what is really happening is Iraq, where the mess seems to be getting worse by the week. Here is an extract from a centre page summary by Simon Jenkins from the Guardian on Tuesday:

In America last week, I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans – but it is not the same. It is total anarchy.
All sentences beginning “what we should do now in Iraq…” are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to “do” anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.
From all available reports, Iraq south of Kurdistan border is beyond central authority, a patchwork of ganglands, sheikhdoms and lawlessness. Anbar province and most of the Sunni triangle is controlled by independent Sunni militias. The only safe movement for outsiders is by helicopter at night. Baghdad is like Beirut in 1983, with nightly massacres, roadblocks everywhere and mixed neighborhoods emptying into safe ones. As yesterday’s awful kidnappings show, even a uniform is a death certificate. As for the cities of the south, control depends on which Shia militia has been able to seize the local police station.
The Iraqi army, such as it is, cannot be deployed outside its local area and is therefore useless for counter-insurgency. There is no central police force. There is no public administration. The Maliki government barely rules the Green Zone in which it is entombed. American troops guard it as they might an outpost of the French Legion in the Sahara. There is no point in patrolling a landscape one cannot control. It merely alienates the population and turns soldiers into targets.
To talk of a collapse into civil war if “we leave” Iraq is to completely misread the chaos into which that country has descended under our rule. It implies a model of order wholly absent on the ground. Foreign soldiers can stay in their bases, but they will no more “prevent civil war” than they can “import democracy”. They are relevant only as target practice for insurgents and recruiting sergeants for Al-Qaida. The occupation of Iraq has passed from brutality to sheer idiocy.

A lot of current reports in the US media appear to be more like the US whistling to keep its spirits up. The sort of reporting that I am consistently reading in the USA is superficial in the extreme, and is almost devoid of facts or seriousness. It is almost as though the Iraq occupation (and let us not kid ourselves, that is what it is) cannot be reported on or discussed in detail, lest it suddenly become a bigger embarrassment than it already is. However, the net result is that the whole mess in Iraq is being glossed over on a daily basis.
Concealing or glossing over the depth and breadth of the US predicament in Iraq is not going to make the problems go away, any more than openly discussing the problems is "giving comfort to the enemy" (a slogan which is so devoid of any logic or meaning that the slogan itself needs to be interned in Guantanamo).
The idea that the subject of Iraq cannot be discussed in detail might have some validity in a true war situation, but I see no evidence on my travels that the US is at war with anybody. When I see conscription, rationing, and a forceful national focus on the conflict, I'll believe that the US is at war. Until then this conflict is a national diversion that most people would prefer to ignore, but cannot.
In the UK, every Iraq casualty is being profiled in the national media, almost to a level reminiscent of martyrdom. Tony Blair's reputation is in tatters, partly as a result of the Iraq conflict, where the prevailing view is that he is a sycophantic toadie to George W. Bush (and the British people do not like sycophants). Most people I have spoken to since I arrived in the UK want Blair to disappear from the political scene, preferably yesterday, and they want nothing more to do with the Bush administration.
Unfortunately, there is no sensible debate currently occurring in the US or the UK about what to do next in Iraq. The prevailing sentiment is "we need to get out", but that in itself is no more useful than "stay the course". Sudden withdrawal will likely ignite scenes similar to the infamous US departure from Vietnam in 1976. Continuing with the current policies and tactics is, however, unlikely to produce better results.
The regional superpowers (Iran, Syria and Egypt) have no real incentive to help the US, especially since the US has been throwing around terms like "Axis Of Evil" and occasionally threatening both Iran and Syria for more than 5 years. In addition, little or no pressure has been applied to Israel to persuade that country to modify its draconian policies towards the Palestinian enclaves.
The result is that at the moment, the US has limited leverage and little influence in the region. That is what generally happens when you abandon diplomacy in favour of macho posturing. As a work colleage of mine observed, "macho does not prove mucho".
The history of the Iraq occupation has become an object lesson in what happens when you invade and occupy a country with no clear strategy of what to do next beyond fine-sounding slogans including words like "democracy". "Importing democracy" is not like planting crops, no matter how far one stretches the agricultural analogies. Democracy is not highly-regarded in the Middle East by many people; Israel is held up in the Western world as an example of a functioning democracy, but is seen as a tyrannical occupying power, and the majority of the region's governments have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever, yet many of them have been supported in the past by the United States. In short, the prevailing "street" opinion is that democracy is a bill of goods designed to maintain US hegemony.
One of the best things that the US and Britain could do is to ban the word "democracy" from any discussion's of Iraq's future. If the future of Iraq does not initially include Western-style representative democracy, that would be unfortunate, but the priority has to be to achieve some measure of stability and order in the region, and if democracy has to take a back-seat, so be it. It is time to put away the fine-sounding aspirational phrases and become ruthlessly pragmatic. On a wider tront, there is no shame in eschewing talk of democracy, since the phrase has limited credibility when uttered by any US government representative. It takes only a cursory reading of recent world history to realize that the USA has waxed poetic about "democracy" while simultaneously working to undermine and destabilize any country where the democratic processes yielded a result that they did not like (Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela...etc. etc.). Simple observation leads me to the conclusion that the USA's geopolitical concept of democracy is similar to the phrase "everybody is entitled to my opinion"; democracy is a fine concept until a country dares to elect a government that does not regard the USA as the Greatest Country In The World. Being told about "democracy" by the United States is like having to listen to Tony Soprano talking about law and order. One does not know whether to laugh or cry.