Here's the offending assertion in Paul Krugman's column today.
You can understand, if not condone, the way the political and media establishment let itself be browbeaten by Mr. Bush in his post-9/11 political prime.
Here's what New Yorker editor David Remnick writes in a profile of Washington Post's longtime publisher, Katherine Graham:
Her inherent faith that the establishment elites will do the right thing is nearly absolute. She really does seem to believe that Watergate was an aberration.
But what happens when an administration goes to war and the Washington establishment (political and media) decides to help the rest of America live a lie?
Mark Danner notes how even the most able American diplomats and politicians construct an alternate reality because the truth is unacceptable. At home, that has led to visible damage to the democratic system, a system which depends on access to the truth. In Iraq, that has meant brutal deaths for hundreds and thousands of people. Journalists and politicals leaders have betrayed both their own country and the Iraqis they said they were helping.
You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know. As this precious stream of flickering knowledge travels "up the chain" from those on the shell-pocked, dangerous ground collecting it to those in Washington offices ultimately making decisions based upon it, the problem of what we really know intensifies, acquiring a fierce complexity. Policymakers, peering second-, third-, fourth-hand into a twilight world, must learn a patient, humble skepticism. Or else, confronted with an ambiguous reality they do not like, they turn away, ignoring the shadowy, shifting landscape and forcing their eyes stubbornly toward their own ideological light. Unable to find clarity, they impose it...
Every step of the way, journalists -- the sentinels, the Paul Reveres -- stayed back, comforted by camaraderie in the safety of a warm pub, avoiding a "browbeating."
