Is "better late..." really better?!1 New study, media pimped Shrub's Iraq Attack for career reasons

[UTUSN]

At this point, it's an everybody-knows thing. Plus, this question has been asked many times before, how come most of us here, withOUT any special intell resources, could see through the FAKE reasons, one after the other-- and yet all these oh-so-smart-and-CONNECTED people just sniffed up after Shrub's rectum without any discrimination?!1

Anyway, this Council of Foreign Relations dude, who himself was FOR the damnable thing "at first" has now done a study and has determined the REASONS the media went wrong: 1) Giving weight to Shrub's pronouncements. 2) Media's own lack of knowledge. 3) and the biggie, CAREER ADVANCEMENT!1

**********QUOTE********

http://trueslant.com/michaelhastings/2009/06/16/media-why-supporting-the-iraq-war-was-the-smart-career-move/

Michael Hastings
The Hastings Report

Media: Why supporting the Iraq War was the smart career move

.... ...So why did the media get it wrong? Gelb pins it on “structural problems” in the way news is reported–like giving heft to daily presidential pronouncements and emphasizing politics over policy. Or–and this is a biggy!–”lack of substantive knowledge.” (A polite way to say that lots of war supporters in DC and New York didn’t really have a clue about Iraq, or the nature of war, for that matter. But that didn’t stop any of them from writing with the veneer of authority.)

Those are all factors, sure. But one of the major overlooked reasons of why journos and pundits were so willing to embrace the Iraq War had nothing to do with “print media” as a faceless institution. It came down to individuals, with faces, bylines, and column inches. It didn’t even have much to do with ideology. It had to do with getting ahead.

Supporting the Iraq War was the smart career move, the savvy play.

To his credit, Gelb makes this point(albeit in a typically CFRish way) towards the bottom of his piece. “My initial support for the war,” he writes “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.” This is quite a statement: to be taken seriously, you had to be on board for the war. And you had career “incentives” to do so. ....

There’s no need for me to name names here. Within a year, most of the folks who got it wrong had publicly begun their intellectual journeys back to common sense. (But if you want names, take a minute to read Slate’s 2004 roundup of war rationalizations and mea culpas, and then again in 2008.) ....

********UNQUOTE********

[Captain Hilts]

1. I take it this is Leslie Gelb Is there a link to Gelb's original comments? nt

[UTUSN]

2. Yeppers, it's "embedded" (pun) in the link above, but log-in is needed

http://www.democracyjournal.org/printfriendly.php?ID=6686


Plus there are links to two of Slate's naming-names:

**********QUOTE********
http://www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2093641/

Should We Have Backed This Invasion?
From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria


http://www.slate.com/id/2187105/
How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?I believed the groupthink and contributed to it.
By Jacob Weisberg

Editor's Note: To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?" We have invited contributions from the best-known "liberal hawks," many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week. Read the rest of the contributions.

********UNQUOTE********

[Captain Hilts]

3. Gelb's book, "The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked" is a good read. nt

[Winterblues]

4. Wasn't Countdown created just for the Iraq War?

It certainly made Keith Olberman's Career although not in the way this guy is referring too.