The basic ethics of a journalist that calls for:

1. Seeking truth,
2. Providing fair and comprehensive account of events and issues
3. Thoroughness and honesty

All are victims of the massive agenda driven competition for economic or political supremacy. The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.

My assessment is that your profession, to some extent, has strayed from these ethical standards and allowed external agendas to manipulate what the American public sees on TV, what they read in our newspapers and what they see on the web. For some of you, just like some of our politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas.

Ltg (Ret) Ricardo S. Sanchez, Military Reporters and Editors Address, Washington D.C. (12/10/2007)

General R.S. Sanchez, former top responsible for the US troops in Iraq, is clearly annoyed with the continuously biased reports that American (and, indeed, the Western world's) press publishes about the Iraq War.

The rest of the report is a categorical blast to the war strategy followed by the Bush Jr. administration, which has been conveniently broadcast by the mainstream press: BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc.

BBC, in another one of its typical "un-biased" liberal news headlines provides a piece of video and audio news with the title "Gen Sanchez speaks out against the Iraq war" (reachable from the link above); once the video is downloaded, one can see that its title is "Gen Sanchez damns Iraq war"; but the brief explanation indicates that Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez has condemned the current strategy in the conflict, calling it a "nightmare". However, Gen Sanchez critizised the current strategy in the conflict, not the Iraq war itself.: if you spend a bit of time reading such report, you'll notice all kinds of accusations against the war strategy and the US decision-makers, but not even one against the need of the war or the war itself. Have you been able to follow back the degree of distorsion journalists are used to do?

Obviously none of the papers and news agencies have mentioned the first part of the report where they have been directly reprimanded. I support Gen Sanchez at least in his denounce of the ethics-lacking journalists.

The fourth power's unethical behaviour is a corruptive cancer of the democracy.