Could they have reported it another way?

It's either genuine MSM bias, or I've gotten hypersensitive to the point of uselessness. I saw this picture: Since I knew Bush was speaking at the Naval Academy, I instantly assumed that the picture was intended to show that his speech had put the midshipmen to sleep. Reading the Reuters text accompanying the picture showed that my conclusion was wrong:

Midshipmen catch naps as they wait for more than an hour for U.S. President George W. Bush to deliver an address on the war in Iraq at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland November 30, 2005. Trying to counter critics of his war strategy, Bush vowed on Wednesday that U.S. forces will not cut and run from Iraq but said improvements in Iraqi security forces may clear the way for a reduction in U.S. troops.

In other words, it's a rather charming photo of some very sleepy students. Events proved that Bush was warmly received once he appeared and they woke up. Nevertheless, I still remain a bit disturbed by the photo's text. It's this bit that's the problem: "Trying to counter critics of his war strategy...." To my finely tuned legal ear (and we really do care about this type of nuance in legal writing), that opening strongly implies that he did not, could not, cannot, counter critics. More neutral phrasing might have been, "Rebutting critics...." or "Countering critics...." or "Addressing critics...." But to say that he was "trying to" counter those critics is a clear indication that the writer feels he is in fact not capable of doing so. UPDATE: Wizbang caught an AP story that displayed the same, shall we say, "carelessness" in sentence structure and terminology, this time about Alito.