Here's Paul Krugman's Op Ed in NY Times on 10th anniversary of Iraq war:
So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesnt look like it.
The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that everyone thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents but they were out of the mainstream.
The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party.
CNNs Howard Kurtz, who was at The Washington Post at the time, recently wrote about how this process worked, how skeptical reporting, no matter how solid, was discouraged and rejected. Pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war, he wrote, were frequently buried, minimized or spiked.
Closely associated with this taking of sides was an exaggerated and inappropriate reverence for authority. Only people in positions of power were considered worthy of respect. Mr. Kurtz tells us, for example, that The Post killed a piece on war doubts by its own senior defense reporter on the grounds that it relied on retired military officials and outside experts in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war.
All in all, it was an object lesson in the dangers of groupthink, a demonstration of how important it is to listen to skeptical voices and separate reporting from advocacy. But as I said, its a lesson that doesnt seem to have been learned. Consider, as evidence, the deficit obsession that has dominated our political scene for the past three years.
Now, I dont want to push the analogy too far. Bad economic policy isnt the moral equivalent of a war fought on false pretenses, and while the predictions of deficit scolds have been wrong time and again, there hasnt been any development either as decisive or as shocking as the complete failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Best of all, these days dissenters dont operate in the atmosphere of menace, the sense that raising doubts could have devastating personal and career consequences, that was so pervasive in 2002 and 2003. (Remember the hate campaign against the Dixie Chicks?)
But now as then we have the illusion of consensus, an illusion based on a process in which anyone questioning the preferred narrative is immediately marginalized, no matter how strong his or her credentials. And now as then the press often seems to have taken sides. It has been especially striking how often questionable assertions are reported as fact. How many times, for example, have you seen news articles simply asserting that the United States has a debt crisis, even though many economists would argue that it faces no such thing?
In fact, in some ways the line between news and opinion has been even more blurred on fiscal issues than it was in the march to war. As The Posts Ezra Klein noted last month, it seems that the rules of reportorial neutrality dont apply when it comes to the deficit.
What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority. If you hear that everyone supports a policy, whether its a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether everyone has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/opinion/krugman-marches-of-folly.html?_r=0
