Why Big Media Journalism is Succeeding: Only Incompetents Get Rewarded and Promoted

Judy Miller's lies got onto the front page and, at the same time, there was a significant dearth of (correctly) skeptical stories.

A few years ago, David Brooks, New York Times columnist and media pundit extraordinaire, penned a love letter to the idea of meritocracy. It is "a way of life that emphasizes ... perpetual improvement, and permanent exertion," he effused, and is essential to America's dynamism and character. Fellow glorifiers of meritocracy have noted that our society is superior to nepotistic backwaters like Krygystan or France because we assign the most important jobs based on excellence. This makes us less prone to stagnancy or, worse yet, hideous national clusterfucks like fighting unwinnable wars for reasons nobody understands.

At Radar we are devoted re-readers of the Brooks oeuvre and were struck by this particular column. It raised interesting questions. Noticing our nation is stuck in an unwinnable war (or two), we wondered if America hasn't stumbled off the meritocratic path. More specifically, since political pundits like Brooks play such a central role in our national decision-making process, maybe something is amiss in the world of punditry. Are the incentives well-aligned? Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?

So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition. (Because conservative pundits generally acted as a well-coordinated bloc, more or less interchangeable, all four of our hawks are moderates or liberals who might have been important opponents of the war—so, sadly, we are not able to revisit Brooks's eloquent and thoroughly meritless prognostications.)

Then we did a career check ... and found that something is rotten in the fourth estate.

The rest is here, including studies of the four specimen: Tom Friedman, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, and Jeffrey Goldberg, as well as the losers, those who suffered for being right on this naty, pointless war: Robert Scheer, William S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter.

Moral: Honesty is not the best policy, kids.

The good news: Big Media journalism is putting itself out of business. Maybe the big journo media will disappear, replaced by niche cable channels, websites and bloggers but days of the print and broadcast dinosaurs will be soon ending....