From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

On November 7th, the Wichita Eagle had this front page headline.

Troop Death Toll in Iraq hits new high.

It was true.

With two months to go, 2007 had already become the bloodiest year of the war.

But just a couple of paragraphs later came another fact.

Violence is sharply down in Iraq,

and the 38 American deaths in October were the fewest since March 2006.

So why the glass half-empty headline?

In the wake of a military surge aimed at stemming violence,

isn't the smaller number bigger news?

Rush Limbaugh certainly thinks so.

That is news.

That is huge news.

But not to these guys.

Because it doesn't fit the narrative, ladies, if the narrative is burning cars, IEDs, people in the streets mangled bodies smoke-wafting up from the streets. And none of that happened yesterday in Iraq.

There's no news.

Got it.

We'll return later to the question of

just who needs a predetermined narrative. But for the moment, let's say you don't need to be a talk

radio demagogue to wonder if the liberal media are up to their old tricks. When death toll was

...