On Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources show on CNN, Pam Hess of UPI asks the question about The Surge--and then explains why it's not being asked by other reporters (video here):

It's so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It's on the cover of "The New York Times" today, what this means for the '08 election. But we're not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you're carrying Bush's water. There are national security questions at stake, and we're ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.

But that's OK for the majority of the media, because the wrong people are in charge of the country right now. Or as Jay Nordlinger recently wrote:

I have a friend who, in a phone conversation last weekend, said the unsayable. Come to think of it, this friend makes a specialty of saying the unsayable. That is one reason he is invaluable.

He said, “The Democrats have to win in 2008 — I mean, the whole enchilada: House, Senate, and presidency.” You ought to know that my friend is a staunch conservative Republican. “Why?” I said. “Why do they have to win?” He answered, “Because that’s the only way they will be fully onboard the War on Terror. They won’t fully support it otherwise, because they will always be trying to trip up the Republicans. If you want the Democrats onboard the War on Terror, they have to be in charge. Period.”

Jonah Goldberg once described it as "hypocrophobia", the fear that the wrong people (I.E. Bush and Republicans) will get credit for rehabilitating the region, much as Ronald Reagan was able to get virtually all of the credit for defeating the Soviet Union, since most American liberals--on both sides of the aisle--decided during the Vietnam war that living with an expansive totalitarian regime was the only solution.

And sadly, I think the examples raised by both Nordlinger and Jonah have to be considered true, once you compare the astounding flip-flops that both the elite media and liberal politicians have made to reach their current mindset, compared to the positions they held in 1998.

Or to borrow from a post of ours from a few years ago, just listen for the Copperhead Conjunction.

Update: Jay Reding (found via Greg Tinti) writes:

That’s right — for the press, it’s irrelevant what information is the most important in determining the course of American policy — it’s all about bashing Bush. The Ahad-like fixation the President means we’re not getting the whole story. No one is questioning what would happen if we were to withdraw from Iraq. Even though that question is profoundly important for the future of this nation and the Middle East, it’s taboo because it’s politically incorrect to be asking such questions.

The media no longer cares about objective reporting, giving people the truth, or asking tough questions. It’s all about scoring cheap political shots and vapid celebrity news. The media is utterly broken, and for all the talk about how terrible Fox News is for actually reporting stories that might be perceived as friendly to the Bush Administration, the mainstream media is perfectly willing to distort the news or ignore crucial stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda.

I'm not at all sure it's that recent a development, to be honest. But the combination of extreme BDS amongst wide swatches of the legacy media, and the rapid growth of the Blogosphere and its ability to shed light on bad reporting simply makes it appear that way.