Kristol and Hamill Lock Horns Over Iraq Images

As I mentioned earlier, IFC hosted a luncheon today to promote its news press-crit series, The IFC Media Project, hosted by ex-MTV wunderkind Gideon Yago. Arianna Huffington moderated a discussion about "the state of news media today"; on the panel were Yago, conservative disloyalist Christopher Buckley, columnist/author Pete Hamill and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (who was introduced, to his obvious embarrassment, as "New York Times columnist Bill Kristol.")

The best part came early when Hamill and Kristol locked horns over whether government restrictions on images from the Iraq war had prevented Americans from getting a realistic idea of the carnage. "Let them see what's on the ground," shouted Hamill. "Let them see the coffins."

"They show plenty of coffins," insisted Kristol. (Silicon Alley Insider has video of the exchange.) He later insisted that the publication of photos from Abu Ghraib proved that the government wasn't impeding the flow of information from Iraq. "The notion that this is an example of fantastically devious and successful U.S. government control of the media -- that fantastically devious and successful control lasted about six to nine months."

Other highlights:

-Kristol: "People should not be too nostalgic about the past. The good old days weren't that good....We would be shocked if we in this room time-traveled back to 1970 and saw the news. We would be shocked by how limited it was and how utterly dependent on just a few news organizations."

-Buckley on his new career as a blogger: "I'm amazed by the immediate and the intimacy of it. You -- I think it's called you 'post' it -- and then within minutes people are either praising or insulting you in the comments thing below."

-Buckley on the urgency of cable news:

I grew up in a day and age where, if you were watching TV and you saw the words "breaking news" come up, it meant that a president had been assassinated or the Soviets had put missiles in Cuba. Now you're walking through an airport and it says "breaking news" on CNN, it means a truck with flammable liquids has overturned.

-Kristol on whether the press should have gotten the WMD story right: "Our intelligence services failed. Obviously that was a massive failure. It wasn't a journalistic failure....How were journalists supposed to know something Sen. Clinton didn't know?"

-Hamill on his journalistic mantra, "If you want it to be true, it usually isn't": "Great advice. Hedge funds should have it on their front door."

-Kristol on the "peer pressure" that causes journalists to adhere to the ideological biases of the news organizations they work for: "A lot of it is almost not conscious. It's getting along with your colleagues. It's not being a pain in the newsroom. It's not being a pain in the TV studio."

-Hamill on the ubiquity of pundits in the modern media: In the old days, he said, "we believed that the columnist was like the soloist in the band. You got up and you blew eight bars and then you sat down. You were not the band."

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