The point you’re missing is that there is no point
By In Iraq, the media’s biases happen to fit the circumstances. Being primed to consider any military conflict a quagmire and another Vietnam is a drawback when covering a successful U.S. military intervention, but not necessarily in Iraq. Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war.
Here’s the thing, though, Rich; the “pessimistic” liberal media never said any of those things, or at least not in any systematic way outside off the fantasy world of right-wing hacks. I remember the killing of Zarqawi, and the capture of Hussein, and the deaths of Uday and Qusay, and the purple fingers, and toppling of the statue, and I remember that the media was deliriously enthusiastic about each. Perhaps the enthusiasm dampened as time went on, but it was bloody difficult at the time to find an assessment of Saddam’s capture at a mainstream media outlet that wasn’t blindly optimistic.
So, Rich, it would be more appropriate to say that “most of the pessimistic warnings (that we imagined came) from the mainstream media have turned out to be right.”