Whether Americans can expect better is an open question, however.
A strong argument even could be made that Krugman is wrong suggesting that the news media just wanted to "prettify" American history or that I was wrong in speculating that the distorted reporting on the Election 2000 recount was just a case of putting patriotism over professionalism.
A harsher interpretation is that journalists put their careers - not their love of country - ahead of their duty to tell the American people the truth. In other words, big media personalities may have understood that challenging Bush would put their big pay checks in harm's way. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Answer Is Fear."]
That also appears to have been the pattern during the run-up to war with Iraq. It was safer for journalists to toe the line on Bush's case for war with Iraq than to contest the dubious arguments presented by the likes of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.
One only needs to look back at the op-ed pages in the days after Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, to see the lock-step thinking of columnists across the mainstream political spectrum.
Even though Powell's speech was riddled with falsehoods and questionable assertions, none of the many journalists who safely positioned themselves at Powell's feet suffered professionally for their lack of professional skepticism. Many of the same columnists are still holding down lucrative jobs on the Washington Post op-ed page or as pundits on TV talks shows.
There's also little indication that skepticism has been ramped up to the levels that would seem justified by the long list of Bush's discredited war rationales.
Last March, for instance, many commentators - including New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and the Washington Post's David Ignatius and the editorial boards of the Times and the Post - were hailing Bush's new Iraq War rationale, that is was the instrument to advance "democratization" in the Middle East.
Just as the pundits had bought into the WMD claims in 2002-2003, they fell for Bush's argument that the invasion of Iraq would spread democracy across the Islamic world and thus destroy Islamic extremism. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocon Amorality" or "Bush's Neocons Unbridled."]
Since then, as the optimism about "democratization" has receded - from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iraq and Lebanon - the Bush administration and the pundit class have shifted rationales again, this time to a modern version of the "domino theory" - that a quick withdrawal from Iraq is unthinkable because it would undermine U.S. credibility.
Just as it was nearly impossible to find a prominent U.S. pundit who challenged Bush's original WMD claims, there's now a scarcity of commentators who dare to make the argument that a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq might undercut Islamic terrorism (by driving a wedge between Iraqi Sunni insurgents and outside jihadists who have come to Iraq to kill Americans). That wedge, in turn, could help stabilize Iraq, while Washington could focus on removing other root causes of Islamic anger, such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iraq & the Logic of Withdrawal."]
Repositioned Pundits
Still, self-interest remains the driving force behind Washington punditry. So, some columnists seem to be repositioning themselves in the face of Bush's slipping popularity, by sniping at Bush about style while continuing to support him on substance.
For instance, a Washington Post column by New Republic editor Peter Beinart chides Bush for refusing to meet with Cindy Sheehan, a mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. But Beinart, who supported the Iraq invasion, adds that Bush "is right to refuse" Sheehan's call for a U.S. withdrawal because "it would be a disaster for national security and a betrayal of our responsibility to Iraq." [Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2005]
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