Why the Press Failed: “There’s nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank to a halt to help you spot problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full defensive mode and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and elsewhere in the Washington bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets, and charges to reporters, our press looks more recognizably journalistic. But that shouldn’t stop us from asking how an ‘independent’ press in a ‘free’ country could have been so paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to seriously investigate administration rationales for war, but little took into account the myriad voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought to do so. It was certainly no secret that a number of our Western allies (and other countries), administrators of various NGOs, and figures like Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix, head of the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, had quite different pre-war views of the ‘Iraqi threat.'” — Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley (TomDispatch)