Better to be conventionally wrong

Dday live-blogging at Hullabaloo from the Netroots Nation meeting in Austin Texas posts these fascinating comments from Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman ... says he was never told to stop writing what he was writing in the run-up to war through much of the Bush years, but he was told that he was making management nervous. In 2005, he was indirectly told to lay up a bit, and that "the election solved some things." He said that a lot of these failures of the media aren't exactly political. They go beyond politics. "It is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." The example is how nobody who was actually right about the war is allowed to comment about it, but that's also true with the housing bubble, etc. "There's something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early." There's a narrow range of being counter-intuitive. It's acceptable, for example, to say "Bush is actually better on the environment than you think."