"Lots of media people, liberal as well as conservative, were wrong about the war," opines Kurtz.

---
This would be a straw man, as in:

"Your Honor, as you are so well aware in your capacity as a judge in this courtroom, many many other people besides my client have occasionally run afoul of the law."

On March 17, 2003, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq, Bill Kristol wrote the following:

"We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts."

A stunning catalog of Kristol's abysmally poor predictive ability during the past 4 years is on display at ...

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_glenngreenwald_archive.html

Here's another Bill Kristol nugget from April 4, 2003:

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

This is not a case of Mr. Kristol, like everyone, missing the goal posts every now and then.

Theassertion of fact made above is mindnumbingly ignorant and, if any more evidence was needed, has been proven utterly and disastrously wrong.

Good quote, Douglas. And as Kristol would doubtless say, "When the war ends in 2055, we'll learn the verdict."

For us, it's an endless, thankless chore of groundskeeeping -- "Whack-A-Mole" -- forever.

Ellen is right!  Super quote!

I especially like this part:

But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. 

Yes indeedy, Mr. K.  It surely has, hasn't it?   

aMike

The modern concept of "balance" in our media: Kristol, one baby step away from lunacy, is "matched" against the center-left Kinsley, who spends about 25% of his efforts attacking the left, 50% attacking the right, and the other 25% just sort of pointlessly mumbling. Where are the left wing equivalents of the Kristols and Coulters? Not getting any air time, that's for sure. Shouldn't the media watchdog Kurtz be talking about that? Maybe his headpiece is too full of straw.

I am very glad Mr. Gitlin wrote this post because it strikes at the heart of competency in newspapers and electronic media.

The question is this: should readers and viewers be entitled to expect any level of competence, accuracy and professionalism from a paid writer in a publication? Or not?

What if an editor is presented with a column which bluntly asserts the Irish Potato Famine never occurred? Should the editor have any obligation to correct or delete that assertion of fact? Or not?

I have written editorials for a number of newspapers, and had those copy-edited by the editor, or when I was the editor, by a colleague. Editorials are, or at least should be, scrutinized as carefully for factual correctness as any news story. That is a publication's sacred obligation to its readers. The same applies to op/ed columns and essays. There is no lower bar of adherence to matters of verifiable fact in an op/ed than in an editorial or a news story.

Mr. Kurtz seems to opine the opposite: that it is somehow "good" and helpful for the purpose of "debate" to publish the works of authors who are either too lazy or incompetent to check facts for accuracy before they turn in their piece for review upon publication, or wish to willfully lie.

I somehow doubt Mr. Kurtz would hold this position if Mr. Kristol routinely asserted the Holocaust never occurred. But, I don't know.

Being Wrong Is What He Does Best

What else can he be but wrong? When has he ever been correct? Kurtz is a putz. Hey Howie, what does your wife say about this?

Look, let's be honest here. Kristol got his job(s) for one reason and one reason only, his daddy. Remind you of others in the DC area?

With the exception that Chomsky is logical--it's his premises that are uncomfortable.

Is anyone else besides me bothered by the pidgin-Chinglish in the title of this post? Good post, Todd, but stupid headline.

-- Ned

It's a reference to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," Ned: "Mistah Kurtz, he dead."

Didn't know that -- thanks. Sorry, Todd.

It is a dangerous mistake, and an tragic failure of awareness that the complicit parrots in the MSM continue to pretend that the Bush government deserves one nanoparticle of respect, goodwill, goodfaith, of trust.

The fascist warmongers and profiteers disintegrated the possibility of deserving or warranting any credibility, legitimacy, and trust long ago.

The Bush government is a deceptive, abusive, FAILING, criminal regime profiteering wantonly from the promotion of fascist policies in prosecution of the insane delusions of the Pax Americana neverendingwar and empire agenda advanced by socalled neocons or Vulcans, (ie FASCISTS.)

The Bush regime has betrayed the peoples trust repeatedly and insistantly, mangled, dismembered, and redefined the Constitution, ruthlessly refused to abide by, and consistenly operates above, beyond, outside, and in total disdain of the laws of the land and the rule of law, and have perverted and disgraced the core principles that formally defined American democracy.

This government deserves NO respect, goodwill, goodfaith, or trust from anyone, and stands singularly responsible, accountable, and culpable for the radical perversion, shaming, betrayal, dismembering, redefining, and re-engineering of America.

So let me get this straight: Bush is now defying the Baker Report, Congress, the military, and the American public by escalating the war...Forgive me for not brimming over with optimism...
www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com

Chomsky is a poor choice, actually. Someone posted an excellent quotation from Kristol, above. Notice the object of Kristol's drooling ire: the French, the UN, and the Democrats. Kristol is an ideologue, but he's also something of a Republican drone. Chomsky is anything but that, and in fact, he criticizes Democrats with nearly the same fervor he does Republicans and Republicanism. I want to see anti-Republican mouth breathers just like I can see the anti-Democratic ones. But they don't exist, at least not where someone like Kurtz seems to be able to find them.

Go to, say, Daily Kos, take your typical poster there, give them some intellectual steroids, and you'll have the sort of thing it takes to balance what the media put on the air from the right side of the spectrum. If you can find them at Kos, they have to exist elsewhere. They just don't show up on TV and in the op-ed pages of major newspapers. We get the Kinsleys instead.

Mr. Watts, please learn how to use the ratings system properly.

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Mr. Gitlin says:

But Mistah Kurtz, he blows smoke. There is not one single regular voice on his contractual network, CNN, nor his contractual newspaper, the Washington Post, nor on a single one of the Sunday morning shows, who gets to sound off wholeheartedly about the unending disaster that George W. Bush has committed in Iraq 

This post has been around for awhile, but I was directed via Atrios to two absolutely pertinent posts, and in case any are still tracking this thread I wanted to get them to their attention.

The first is an extensive piece by Jamison Foster at Media Matters for America.  In it Foster argues

• News organizations don't ask, for example, whether people are less likely to believe the administration if it argues that military action against another nation is necessary.

  Instead, they treat public opinion about the Bush administration's honesty as a political challenge, as something with primarily partisan political effects. But when the majority of the American people think their president is dishonest and has already deliberately misled the nation into war once, that has profound national security implications that demand attention from the media.

The rest of the piece is just as elegant and persuasive, and the second half dissects Joe Lieberman as well as anything I've seen written about the essential dishonesty of a man who deserves to be encased in platinum and deposited in the French Academy of Sciences as the international standard measure of hypocrisy.

The other piece is from the on-line version of Radar, which I confess I haven't been aware of before now.  My bad.  It had its own bookmark and I've signed up for the e-mail alerts.  There, the article in question is The Iraq Gamble:  At the pundits' table, the losing bet still takes the pot, by Jedediah Reed, whose work I should have known, but didn't.  I'm going to search him when I finish this.

Reed looks at two sets of careers--those who were universally wrong about Iraq (The Meritocracy of Dunces):

• David Brooks
• Thomas Friedman
• Peter Beinart
• Fareed Zakaria
• Jeffrey Goldberg

And Those who were right, from the start:

• Robert Scheer
• William S. Lind
• Jonathan Schell
• Scott Ritter

The thesis:  tracing the career path of each, 

• . . .we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition. (Because conservative pundits generally acted as a well-coordinated bloc, more or less interchangeable, all four of our hawks are moderates or liberals who might have been important opponents of the war—so, sadly, we are not able to revisit Brooks's eloquent and thoroughly meritless prognostications.)
• Then we did a career check ... and found that something is rotten in the fourth estate.

The way to riches??? be wrong.  The way to watch one's career go down the toilet??? be right.  Hats off to those who dared to be right.  I urge people to check the whole article out.  It is a fine piece of writing. 

aMike