Mass media in the Middle East, largely anti-American, is desperate to recover from the embarrassment of a successful Iraqi election and an unpopular Iraqi "resistance", and is now running some ridiculous stories to compensate. Most of these fictions never make it out of the Arab language press. These are the usual conspiracy theory screeds about how the Americans staged the elections and manipulated the turn out and results. Two that made it into English involved a "captured" (by terrorists) American soldier who turned out to be an action figure. The other was the recent crash of a British C-130. A suspicious video, showing terrorists firing a missile and hitting a C-130, was quickly picked apart. The media misinformation coming out of Iraq has increasingly had a hard time maintaining a convincing cloak of believability. Email from Iraq, and web sites and blogs run by Iraqis have been getting in the way of good stories. Now there are these damn elections. It's tough being a journalist, especially an Arab journalist in Iraq.