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Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU, has an excellent retrospective on realism, idealism, and illusion under the Bush presidency. Take Bob Woodward's State of Denial, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, and George Packer's Assassins Gate, Ron Suskind's Without a Doubt, condense them into a 3-5 page article, and this is what you get. It's one of those rare instances where a blog post manages to pull together facts and ideas from the last half decade and actually make them all make sense.

Here's a sample:

Denial is a psychological state we are all somewhat familiar with and is therefore a more comforting description of the Bush government than the bizarre flight from empiricism that Suskind tried to alert us to. Similarly, realists vs. ideologues is a conflict we can understand without spraining our brains too much. This makes the Dana Milbanks and Joe Kleins of the world happy. When a sturdy distinction still works it’s good news for incumbent interpreters—and journalists are interpreters even when they are “just” reporting—because they don’t have to introduce an unfamiliar language to describe what they are seeing.

More accurate, less credible

Whereas if they tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme.

This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts “the extremes” will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave.

The idea that accuracy improves credibility is comforting. The more accurate you are, the more credible you will be, right? But in extreme situations—and invading Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what to do once there is an extreme situation—an accurate description is likely to be rejected, and the describer treated as in-credible. Reporters and editors are, I believe, intimately aware of this. Bob Woodward, as I have said elsewhere, wrote Plan of Attack because at the time it was a more credible book, even though Attack Without a Plan would have been more accurate[...]

Journalists and talking heads: if this month you wish to tell me that realism is back kindly tell me where you think it had gone to.

To really understand what this administration has done, not only did you have to pay constant attention, you also had to be willing to believe what was in front of your own eyes. They simply are not playing by the same rules, and the press has never been willing or able to adapt to that fact.

More:

Confronted with “…when we act, we create our own reality,” what could the press have done differently?

It could have tried to cover Dick Cheney. Instead, Cheney is by common agreement in the press the most powerful and least scrutinized Vice President in modern American history. Much of the time the press does not know where he is or who he’s meeting with. His is almost a stealth office. Yet he helped engineer the overawing of all reality checks as part of his effort to reclaim “lost” powers for the executive branch. It would have taken a monumental effort to scrutinize Cheney because he was determined to operate without scrutiny. In any event it never happened.

It could have covered the entire retreat from empiricism, which took place across the government, and not just in war-making. There have been thousands of conflicts between the Bush political machine and every variety of reality check known to modern government. Reporters could have connected those dots.

The press could have gone to the old-fashioned empiricists in the Republican Party and asked them if they were worried. (As with this famous piece.) To this day it remains a mystery why supporters of the Bush Agenda saw no threat to its success in the President’s concave habits. (Bush in 2003: “The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”)

It could have followed up on Suskind’s intellectual scoop by, for example, asking how the military dealt with the shift away from a reality-based command. The alarms must have gone off somewhere.

It could have defined Bush not as a conservative or a traditional Republican but as an innovator. For example, Suskind told Salon: “When I was at the White House in 2002, I had a variety of discussions with them about their newfangled message control machine, and their prized discipline. They made a clear decision: We will ignore as best we can the mainstream press and let’s see if there’s any penalty for doing that.” He said the view of Karen Hughes, Bush’s former chief communications advisor, was, “‘We’re not concerned; we don’t see there being any penalty from the voters for ignoring the mainstream press.” That’s innovation.

Why didn’t the press do these things? Part of it is the reluctance to appear partisan. Of course if Suskind’s reporting was correct, the people to whom this news would matter most were reality-based Republicans, members of the military who cannot afford to have any other “base” but reality, and intellectually honest conservatives who believed in Bush and wanted to see him succeed. There’s a lot of truth in what Atrios says about Washington pundits, “They’d rather be wrong than agree with the dirty fucking hippies.”

It's going to take historians decades to unravel the past few years. Understanding what the administration did and why they did it is hard enough. But understanding why the press was so complicit? That, I suspect, is going to be far more difficult. The press, after all, believes its own narrative more than anyone, and that may be its greatest weakness.