Conor Friedersdorf reflects on the phenomena of “warblogging,” in the run-up to the Iraq war–though it started after 9/11–and how it ended up reinforcing the hawkish consensus rather than doubting it:
Pro war bloggers center-left and right used an ideological heuristic, assuming that the MSM would error on the side of excess dovishness, so that the most common media criticism exacerbated rather than corrected the actual errors being made, making the MSM even more pro-war. “I remember spending a week in the offices of the New York TimesOutlook section” in January 2003, Matt Steinglass writes. “The anxiety to self-police against anything that could be perceived as liberal bias was palpable. Smart, serious people convinced themselves to accept the most spurious claims.” To be clear, one needn’t think the war was a mistake, as most Americans do, to grant that the blogosphere’s coverage was flawed: it was wrong on weapons, wrong on how costly the war would be, wrong on how long it would last, and wrong about how it would change the region.
It saw through none of the MSM’s flaws.
James Wolcott, who’s been giving TAC some love lately, reflected on the scene back in 2002:
Blogs scrolled down the screen before Sept. 11, but the horrors of that day had a “big bang” impact, energizing a constellation of individual voices united by a communal understanding that a hole had been blown in the very architecture of our lives. I belong to a number of chat boards, and it soon became glaringly apparent to me that the bloggers had a far keener existential grasp of the trauma wound and the magnitude of the task ahead than these online “communities,” which swiftly reverted to their customary crabby infighting and sneer responses. Blogs are far less parochial, the New York-Washington axis of mainstream media coverage offset by the strong presence of West Coast bloggers (Ken Layne, Matt Welch), with others chiming in from Australia (the acerbic and hilarious Tim Blair), Croatia (Natalija Radic, who appears on the libertarian Samizdata site), and Norway (Bjorn Staerk), nearly all of them citing and providing links to one another, fostering a global clubhouse atmosphere. In the early days of the anti-Taliban campaign, foreign and domestic bloggers countered the defeatism of the dominant media — which was then in its “quagmire” funk — and corrected the falsehoods, exaggerations, and rote groupthink of the punditry. “We can fact-check your ass!” Ken Layne crowed, and the phrase quickly became the rallying cry of blogland.
By 2006, the community had fragmented along the same old partisan lines, to the chagrin of early warblogger Matt Welch:
I had launched my blog (or shall I say “warblog,” which is what I named it, apparently coining a term I’ve come to loathe) five days after the September 11 massacre and almost immediately found myself swept up in an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation. As a consumer, it was exponentially more edifying to me than the post-9/11 fumblings of the mainstream media’s binary, Crossfire-style opinion slinging.“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”
Man, was I wrong.
On the bright side, one of the few folks who called BS on the warbloggers early on, the great Tim Cavanaugh, has just been named executive editor at the Daily Caller. I’d link to his article “Let Slip the Blogs of War,” published in USC’s Online Journalism Review in January 2002, but for a journalism school they seem to keep pretty poor archives.
Charles Cosimano 
Wolcott’s 2002 piece refers in passing to “the defeatism of the dominant media — which was then in its “quagmire” funk,” and Welch, in the linked article, draws a night-and-day distinction between warblogging after 911 into Afghanistan and the runup to Iraq a year and a half later. I think this is an important point that is not sufficiently foregrounded in the 10-years assessments I’m seeing.
Because “quagmire” does represent at least one theme in MSM coverage, not the only one of course, that I clearly remember from the fall of 2001. A few months later, after the Taliban had been routed and Kharzai, wearing his raincoat like a cape, had spoken before a joint session of Congress that view was held to have been completely discredited.
“Quagmire” was an expectation that could not be tested in such a short time, but that seems to have been deliberately misunderstood. The capacity to rout whatever government and visible resistance existed wasn’t questioned by the quagmire thesis as I understood it. It looked to the longer term, to the Soviet experience, and the history before that stretching back into the previous century. It was aware how discredited our new allies, the Northern Alliance was in the eyes of the Pashtun plurality of the country after their years of previous rule. But even to raise these concerns was go where almost nobody cared to follow.
On and after 911, it was plain to me from conversations with, for example, coworkers or members of my family to whom I was not close, that these arguments were both incomprehensible and beside the point. My own casual and shallow knowledge of Afghanistan was vastly greater than that of anyone I encountered; this was brought home to me that afternoon, September 11th, when I showed where Afghanistan was on a map, in response to suggestions involving aircraft carriers, how much overflying we were talking about. It became plain to me very quickly that the need to “kick ass,” regardless of the relevance of what we might attack, was overriding. Noah Millman’s honest memory of the beginning of the Iraq war yesterday was one of the few explicit references to this sentiment I’ve seen.
And this is a crucial part of the puzzle of the Iraq war. Many people were not satisfied by small elite forces and air support tipping the balance in an ongoing civil war. They wanted to see the full weight of American military might brought to bear on someone, and it mattered much less who. Many other people had misgivings about invading Iraq, but they had been silenced and intimidated largely by what had happened a few months before, by how concerns then–which like Welch they might then not have shared–had been received. Afghanistan, both its apparent easy success and frustrating shortfalls were the ruling contexts of March 2003.