Al-Qaeda 24/7

AL-QAEDA 24/7....James Fallows, just now catching up on TV coverage of the Petraeus-Crocker testimony after a few days in deepest China, notes that on CNN "every reference to the adversary in Iraq is to 'al Qaeda.'" Michael Gordon talks about al-Qaeda, Michael Ware talks about al-Qaeda, and Anderson Cooper is a one-man al-Qaeda PR machine. Fallows wonders what's going on:

Jeez louise! Even Petraeus's own briefing slides, which I have just seen, refer to "AQI" — al Qaeda/Iraq, as distinguished from the actual al Qaeda that attacked the American mainland six years ago. Wasn't there a fair amount of fuss a few months ago about the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch trick in pushing the term "al Qaeda in Iraq" as a (bogus) way of stressing a link between Osama bin Laden and whoever is the enemy in Iraq? Why should CNN go along with this — and improve on it, by dropping the "in Iraq" part? Is it that anxious about shaking its "liberal" image? Just curious.