This is part two of a series reporting from Iraq on how the press is doing its job.

KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT — “I hate how the media is covering this war,” a Kellogg Brown & Root contractor at the Kuwait airport snarled when he found out I was a journalist.

That isn’t exactly the way you want to start a conversation when dawn is still a chilly hour or two away and you’re stuck outside drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup, waiting to board a C-130 cargo plane bound for Baghdad. I mumbled something like “Well, it’s complicated …” before just letting the issue drop. Jetlag and lack of sleep had taken the fight out of me.

The C-130 ferrying me, along with a number of aid workers and contractors, to Iraq wouldn’t leave for at least an hour, and we had been waiting in the cold since 3:30 a.m., passing our identification around to KBR employees to ensure ourselves a spot on the flight. After the bus from the Hilton had disgorged us into the desert, we lined up our bags, had roll call and found out that everyone with a Department of Defense card was entitled to a free, hot breakfast at the mess tent. Journalists, unsurprisingly, weren’t included on that list. (I didn’t identify any other journalists on the flight. By and large, this is no longer a freelancers’ war, and many of the larger news outlets now drop their people in from Amman, Jordan, where many of them keep apartments. But the Kuwait route is often cheaper for smaller publications.)

After the breakfast bus mockingly lurched away, I was left with a few USAid workers sitting on picnic benches next to a shipping container that serves as...

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