WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2001 — Talk about burying the news. One of the more noteworthy critiques of how the media have covered the war in Afghanistan appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. Okay, okay, it was on page one, and the Journal's not exactly obscure. But it's probably safe to assume that not a lot of people were paying attention on Christmas Eve. Fortunately, the article is still available online. It's well worth a look.

The article, by staff writer Matthew Rose, argues that the media were consistently pessimistic, and consistently wrong, about the progress of the war. Before the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif in early November, Rose reports, the media was filled with warnings that we were getting into a Vietnam-style "quagmire," that the Taliban and Al Qaeda enjoyed broad support in Afghanistan, and that our intervention would inevitably produce a new generation of terrorists.

Of course, within a few weeks the Taliban fell and Al Qaeda was routed. The master terrorist himself, Osama bin Laden, has either fled to Pakistan or is lying under a pile of rubble in the caves of Tora Bora — unless dubious reports that he recently died of a lung ailment turn out to be true. As for whether we're sowing the seeds of future terrorism, that remains to be seen — but the scenes of cheering Afghans throwing off the cloak of Taliban oppression and gleefully hunting down Al Qaeda fighters would appear to argue against that.

What's particularly striking about Rose's piece, though, isn't so much that the media were wrong (what else is new?), but that the people he interviews so readily fess up to their ignorance.

Take, for example, veteran pundit Nicholas von Hoffman, who wrote a piece for the New York Observer — published just as the Taliban were collapsing — lamenting that the US was "mapless" and "lost," and that the majority of Afghans preferred the Taliban "to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause." Von Hoffman's mea culpa to Rose: "Nobody knew anything about Afghanistan, myself included," adding that "in the prediction business, ... you almost never get it right."

Same thing with National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr, who told listeners on October 15, "Whatever success the Anglo-American alliance is having pounding the Taliban into dust, it's having little success winning the hearts and minds of Islamic peoples." Schorr warned: "Most alarming of all, anti-American feeling is rising in Pakistan, where the Taliban come from, threatening the stability of of the Musharraf regime." Of course, it now appears that we did win the hearts and minds of the "Islamic peoples" of Afghanistan, or most of them anyway. And there's been little anti-American unrest in Pakistan or the rest of the Islamic world. "I had to eat a little crow," Schorr told the Journal. "I have never been in Afghanistan and know nothing about Pashtuns and the rest of it." Nice work, Danno!

What's interesting about Rose's piece, though, is not what it tells us about the "news media" as a whole — the purported subject of his article — but, rather, about the limits of the punditocracy in a time of war. In fact, practically every example cited by Rose involves a pundit, not a hard-news reporter — certainly not any of the courageous journalists who are on the ground in Afghanistan, eight of whom have already lost their lives. Rather, Rose offers us the faulty predictions of the New York Times' R.W. Apple and Maureen Dowd, the Los Angeles Times' Jacob Heilbrunn, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the New Republic's editorial page, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, the Nation's Katha Pollitt, and others. In retrospect, we shouldn't be surprised that none of them had anything useful to say.

In his still-relevant critique of the news media, Breaking the News (1996), James Fallows noted that the game of punditocracy had become one of being as negative and sneering as possible. He quoted an ABC reporter as saying, "You can be wrong, as long as you're negative and skeptical. But if you're going to say something remotely positive, you'd better be 150 percent right or you're going to be accused of rolling over."

That attitude may have worked when the stakes were much lower — say, when the issue was whether Bill Clinton could make himself relevant following Newt Gingrich's ascendancy. Since the correct answer was "who cares?", the pundits could ooze ridiculous predictions out of every pore without consequence.

But that was then. What we need now are information, insight, and informed analysis — and the media as a whole, to their credit, are giving us quite a bit. What we don't need need are pundits who breezily spout off about matters of which they later admit they know nothing.