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When Army Spc. Bobby Hillen arrived in war-torn Iraq in January 2004, he saw small children playing in bomb craters in the streets.

As he was leaving Iraq a year later, Hillen, a National Guard soldier from Brookline, recalls seeing children being shepherded into new schools that were part of the U.S. and coalition forces' reconstruction effort.

"It was a drastic difference," said Hillen, 22, who believes most Americans never see such accomplishments because the media generally ignore positive developments in Iraq.

"It's a slap in the face to a soldier when you turn on the news and all you hear are the negative aspects," he said.

Hillen is not alone in his views. Other Iraqi war veterans from the Pittsburgh region contend that much of the good news that takes place in Iraq -- such as schools, hospitals and roads being built and utility services being restored -- fails to make the high-profile reports. As a consequence, violence becomes the whole picture.

Patrick Witcop, of Kennedy, who was a first sergeant with the 307th Military Police Company in Iraq for much of 2003, came home for an emergency leave in November that year. After watching the evening news for two weeks, Witcop got the impression the war had taken a turn for the worse, he recalled.

"I was anxious to get back to my unit," he said. "When I got back, it was no worse. It was just the reporting making it look awful."

A new national organization -- Families United for Our Troops and Their Mission, a group that supports the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has addressed the issue in recent news releases. One release quoted an Army reservist from Pennsylvania who said he was "so angered by the media's portrayal of what is going on over there, like all that happens are explosions and killings."

"Unfortunately, the one daily bomb that's blown up is what is reported. That leads the American public to believe that all of Iraq is chaos. That's not the case," said Chuck Larson, an Iowa state senator and U.S. Army Reserve major, who founded Families United as an outgrowth of an earlier project, Operation Iraqi Hope.

Families United was started in response to the anti-war movement that gathered steam in August when Cindy Sheehan drew worldwide attention with her 26-day vigil outside President Bush's Texas ranch. Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Casey, was killed last year in an ambush in Sadr City, Iraq.

Larson, who was deployed in Iraq last year, criticized the anti-war movement for eroding confidence in the military's mission. The U.S. has achieved "tremendous successes since we liberated Iraq" in March 2003, he said. The achievements include more than 2,400 new schools, hospitals, clinics, police stations and other facilities, he said.

The effort has been costly. More than 1,900 American soldiers have been killed and more than 14,000 wounded.

Five Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers were among the latest killed, in a roadside bombing west of Baghdad, on Sept. 29. Those deaths pushed the state's death toll in the war past 100. More than 3,200 Pennsylvania guardsmen are deployed in Iraq, the highest per capita in the nation.

The war also has cost American taxpayers more than $200 billion.

Mt. Lebanon lawyer Douglas Hottle, 46, an Army reservist who served in Iraq from July 2004 until early February, helped collect and distribute $150,000 worth of school supplies that were donated by Americans to Iraqi pupils through Operation Iraqi Hope. No major television network was interested in doing a story on the project, Hottle said.

"Well, look at it, if you have soldiers delivering school supplies to children on video, or a building blowing up and killing children -- what's going to be shown?" he said.

Friends who received e-mails from Hottle about progress in rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure -- schools, water systems, sewers, clinics, roads and canals -- later "came up to me and said, 'Gee, we really saw a side over there that was never reported in the media,' " he said.

Purdue University communication professor Yahya Kamalipour, an authority on U.S. and worldwide media, said news coverage of the war in Iraq is a reflection of all reporting.

"Violence overrides everything else," he said. "There are more good things happening everywhere, but when you look at the evening news, the focus is on what's wrong: murder and violence. Audiences like to see sensational news and read about murders and bad news. The good things in the midst of destruction and killing get lost in the process."

"The reality is that in Iraq, soldiers and innocent people are being killed every day," he said.

The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog organization based in Alexandria, Va., plans to release a study this week -- in advance of the vote scheduled for Saturday in Iraq on the nation's new constitution -- that analyzes news stories about the war that have been broadcast this year on the three major television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS.

"There have been positive stories on the networks, but that's in the minority and sometimes they get completely eclipsed," said Rich Noyes, the center's research director, who has studied more than 1,300 television news broadcasts since Jan. 1.

"It is plain that a lot of the coverage is about insurgent bombings and setbacks in the political process," he said.

"From a journalistic standpoint, it's hard to say that a big bombing is not major news," Noyes said. "On the other hand, the public is trying to make up its mind about whether or not this mission is worth pursuing or (is) a lost cause. When the news is dominated by the insurgent attacks -- and people rarely hear about the progress -- they are going to be demoralized.

"It's not a surprise that polls are showing the public increasingly ready to wash their hands of the whole thing."

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