All things being equal

So the liberal media has been doing their best to hammer it into our heads that the Iraq war is a total mess, was unjustified, and could quite possibly be worse than the Vietnam War. Bush's approval ratings are plummeting. Is this really a surprise? If the media focuses solely on the negative, it would follow that Americans would also focus on the negative. Who else but the media are we going to get our information about the war from? Every time GW tells us his side of the Iraq war, the media is quick to tell us exactly why he's wrong. And really, isn't he just an idiot that misleads the American people so his oil cronies can become richer?

What I wonder, given all of this negative reporting on Iraq and the subsequent polls showing Americans growing displeasure with the war is this: why doesn't this translate into other areas of the news? My local news is filled with weekly reports of murders throughout the city-gangbangers, druggies, you name it, we have it. Sometimes we lose our police officers to these idiots. Why am I not being polled? Can't I say that my approval rating for the mayor's handling of the 'war on drugs' or the 'war on crime' is low? Why doesn't the media scrutinize the efforts of other elected officials? Why aren't they demanding that our "troops" pull out of those high crime, high murder areas? Why aren't they scrutinizing the plans our local elected officials have or don't have in place to fight crime? To save our "children" that are dying on the police force? Why am I supposed to assume that in my city, even though the news coming out of it is primarily bad, that overall it is still a good city? Wouldn't it stand to reason that if my city is overall a good city despite the plethura of bad news coming out of it, that Iraq can overall being going well despite the abundance of bad news that the media reports?