CNN Also Mistakes Victory for Violence

NRO's Stephen Spruiell recently noted the Washington Post's use of passively constructed leads to turn major Talibani defeats into lamentable generic violence. CNN joins in with today's story titled "Afghan fighting: Another 29 killed":

At least 29 people have been killed in the latest bloodshed in the escalating conflict in southern Afghanistan, according to the U.S.-led coalition. The coalition command in Kabul said Wednesday that 24 insurgents, four Afghan National Army soldiers and one Afghan National Police officer were killed late Tuesday in the Tarin Kowt District of Uruzgan province. This six-hour fight began "when a joint combat patrol of Afghan and coalition forces returned fire against several enemy fighters who were hiding in a compound shooting at them." The troops responded "with heavy machine gun fire and forced the attackers to retreat. Enemy fighters then attempted to reinforce with additional militants from two nearby compounds." Six Afghan soldiers and three Afghan police were wounded. Heavy fighting between troops and Taliban-aligned fighters has claimed dozens of lives in recent weeks.

In case you missed it, the real story is that a patrol of Afghan soldiers was attacked by Taliban terrorists and the Talibanis were slaughtered with minimal losses to our allies. The final highlighted paragraph refers to another battle where most of the "dozens of lives" were also our enemies. UPDATE: Spruiell compares CNN's Afghan "reporting" with the more informative style of StrategyPage (Thanks for the link).