If you knew a bunch of guys who collectively predicted the winning Super Bowl team before the season started, you'd think they were smart but lucky. However, if after 10 seasons they made seven correct Super Bowl predictions, you would think they really had a grasp of the sport.
But if you knew a group that kept insisting they knew everything about football, yet in 10 years they never managed to name one of the Super Bowl teams, much less the winner, you might question whether they understood the dynamics of the game.
The news media are a lot like the latter group of football fans. They've gotten Iraq wrong in so many respects, one wonders why they bother offering any analysis at all. You remember what the "experts" predicted: invading Iraq would provoke the "Arab steet"; unlike the Gulf War, the Iraqis would defend their country to the death; the United States military is unable to fight an insurgency effectively; turnout in the January election will be light; and so forth. (Curiously, they never predicted that we would find no weapons of mass destruction.)
They do continue, though, as in this account of a BBC reporter confidently predicting an imminent Iraqi civil war. There is a great deal of wishful thinking bound up in that remark, but is part of a much larger, much longer pattern: Stalin is our friend and would never do anything nasty. The North Vietnamese are patriots and would never harm their fellow countrymen. Ronald Reagan will start a nuclear war. Sanctions will dislodge Saddam's army from Kuwait....
Primarily, the press makes bad calls because they have a faulty view of how the universe works. Rather than fix their model so they can make more accurate predictions, they continue to insist on the validity of their assumptions.
This manifests itself in odd ways, most prominently in how they analyze President Bush. The reasoning seems to be this: because he is a slack-jawed Texan who lives his faith, and knows nothing about the outside world, the president is a fool. Therefore, everything he does is foolish. Ergo, any specific action or policy is likely to be disastrous.
This also explains why religous coverage is so abysmal, when it exists at all. Most mainstream press members think that religion is a secondary or tertiary characteristic about a person, like height or body weight, something that might or might not affect one's daily life. For most people in the world, it is what they build their lives around. Instead of making bad predictions, the press is simply baffled by the whole subject and resorts to comfortable terms. Thus, clergy are "liberal" or "conservative," not "traditional" or "hererodox."
In a quite different but still related example, you would have thought that a year ago, Moqtada "Mookie" al Sadr was routing the American military and leading a mass Shiite revolt. In reality, most Shiite leaders looked the other way as the gallant men of the Army's First Cavalry Division slayed 5,000 of Mookie's goons. There was no general Shia uprising, and now the would-be revolutionary is trying to get into normal electoral politics. Had the press considered Mookie's lack of status in the Shiite clerical pecking order, they might have realized that few imams would come to his aid.
This is a fixable problem, but it is an open question as to whether the oldline media can reform itself. They pay themselves in flattery, imagining themselves to be master analysts of the universe, and feeding one's own intellectual pride is as addictive as a narcotic. Admitting their errors and making ideological adjustments is possible, but it's not the way to wager.
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