BILL MOYERS: If we journalists get it wrong on the facts what is there to be right about?
PETER BEINART: Well I think that's a good point, but the argument in the fall of 2002 was not mostly about the facts it was about a whole series of ideas about what would happen if we invaded.
BILL MOYERS: What I'm trying to get at is how does the public sort all of this out from out there beyond the beltway. Far more people saw you, see Bill Kristol on television, than will ever read the Associated Press reports or the Knight Ridder reporters. Isn't there an imbalance then on what the public is going to perceive about a critical issue of life and death like, like war.
...
WALTER ISAACSON: One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters. And in the age of the internet when everybody's a pundit, we're still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that's very expensive.
So, journalism's expensive stuff.
DAN RATHER: Reporting is hard. The substitute for reporting far too often has become let's just ring up an expert. Let's see. These are experts on international armaments. And I'll just go down the list here and check Richard Perle.
As the 43rd POTUS would say: "Reportin's hard work!"
So, rather than report, just call up a war partisan.
