No way to cover a war, that's for sure:

A British colleague of mine was sent by his newspaper to Iraq in 2005, just before the July 7 bombings in London. After that attack, his editor asked him to canvass “ordinary Iraqis” for their reaction. The resulting article reported that all but one of the twelve Baghdadis my colleague spoke to were delighted that Londoners had been blown up. This seemed a surprisingly high proportion, so I asked him a few days later just who these interviewees were and how he’d found them.

With slight sheepishness, he admitted that all the Iraqis he’d canvassed were Sunni Arabs. In other words, his straw poll had been confined to members of a minority that makes up less than 25 percent of the Iraqi population — the same minority that dominated the country for 80 years, that feels humiliated by the empowerment of the Shiite-Kurd majority, and that forms the basis of the anti-coalition insurgency.

How had the British reporter come to meet these interviewees? It turned out that they had been selected by his interpreter and his “fixer.” I asked him to tell me about these persons — good interpreters and fixers being costly and hard to find. Well, my colleague said with an enthusiastic smile, “Ahmed,” his excellent fixer, had done sterling work for him since 2003 and before, when he had been employed by Saddam’s ministry of information. As for his interpreter, “Muhammad” — also terrific — he’d been a colonel in the Republican Guard. Both, it hardly need be said, are Sunnis and former members of the Baath party.

Many of the freelancers,interpeters, and fixers that Western journalists rely upon are Sunnis. Many of them were familiar to journalists from the Saddam Hussein era when Sunnis were a privileged minority. They resent the empowerment of Shiites that was brought about by the toppling of Hussein. Even worse, many of them are of Palestinain heritage. Therefore, we get interviews of carefully selected "typical" Iraqis who bear a grudge and are very desirous of American defeat.