The reason that news media producers view themselves as having been 'skeptical' of the President and the buildup to the Iraq war is that they have internalized the perspective of right wing authoritarians:

'Skeptical' reporting simply means that you're less worshipful of right wing authoritarian figures than those same right wing authoritarian figures might have wished.

You don't have to go back to the standards of journalists as researchers, no, no.

All you have to do is ask President Bush Jr. (or his worshippers) if he (or they) felt like the coverage of Bush Jr's war was sufficiently tilted in his favor, and if he doesn't feel that way, then journalists were standing up and doing their job.

Just like back in Reagan's time, when Reagan and the right wingers were screaming that Nicaragua was about to march up through Mexico and invade Harlingen, Texas.

Many of the news media producers doubted that 'we' were threatened by a direct invasion of the Nicaraguans of Mexico and Texas; on the plus side for the Reaganites, they did all agree that the Nicaraguan government was a problem, had to be changed, and the US had to be allowed to hire thugs to kill people in order to do it, although preferably in a less bloody manner than the Reaganites were wont to do.

Right now we appear to be in that post-catastrophe phase where they media look back upon their previous failure to skeptically judge the hawkish foreign policy agenda of the Executive Branch.

Vietnam, Central America. Over and over.

But nothing has really, structurally changed. Bill Moyer's stinging words will have faded by the time the next big push to do X (attack Iran, or whatever's the hawkish notion two years from now).

The news media institutions are all the same. The staff is all the same. The rules are all the same. There have been no real, measurable changes at any of the major US news media producers to suggest any lessons have been learned whatsoever.

If good people don't see that the only good breadth of coverage and perspectives on the next hawkish foreign policy initiatives will come out of blogs like this (or whatever grows out of these), then we'll just let them all do it again, and once again, afterwards, there will yet again come the routine occasion during which the news media once again analyzes its failures to be skeptical about the Executive's hawkish agenda.