A reader makes some very good points:

You know, I bet if you asked the President or Secretary Rumsfeld if they ever felt the media was being “easy” on them in the run-up to the war, they’d probably have a few choice words on the matter. […] But obviously some feel that the MSM was pulling its punches. Let’s assume for the moment that was true — and maybe it was. So instead of blatant contempt and bias, in 2002 they just had latent contempt and bias. Why would they have done that? To understand these things you always have to go back and try to reimmerse yourself in the historical zeitgeist of the time. Hopping in Hillary’s Time Machine, and going back to 2002, what do we have? Bernard Goldberg’s book Bias had just come out the year before, and the case for media bias is really starting to stick, despite a lot of denials. Bloggers were just starting to come online, and the decline in media revenues is just starting. 9/11 had been the year before, and had exposed the hollowness of much of the 9/10 gestalt — and the press was implicitly indicted in that. The war in Afghanistan — and the way the media’s lousy, knee-jerk “quagmire” coverage was proved to be spectacularly wrong (when we quickly drove the Taliban out) — was another blow to their credibility. Then, finally, in the fall of 2002, the Republicans picked up seats as the country decisively rejected Dems, and by implication, the media. So why did they pull punches, if they did? Because in 2002 they knew their credibility had taken a hit and a good part of the nation was just going to write the media off as the clock that always strikes the same hour, no matter what time it actually is. In 2002 they were still trying to prove they were uber-objective uber-journos with no bias, so I think they intuitively “pulled punches”. Not that it mattered. The public verdict on biased/unbiased I think has been reached, and now it’s like they’ve stopped trying even for the fig leaf of “objectivity” and just want “their side” to win.

The point about the media’s coverage of Afghanistan strikes me as particularly relevant. Those who fault the media for failing to predict a “quagmire” in Iraq forget that they had just incorrectly predicted one in Afghanistan.