War & Peace Quote by Dick Morris

Morris is trying to freeze a media turning point into a morality play: the “real” war, witnessed up close, versus the “manufactured” war, distorted back home. The line is engineered to feel like an eyewitness account of betrayal. “Beginning of the end” isn’t just prediction; it’s a verdict. It frames network news not as an institution struggling with complexity, but as a collapsing authority brought down by its own bad faith.

The subtext rides on a neat rhetorical contrast. “Embedded correspondents” functions as a credibility badge: proximity equals authenticity, danger equals truth. Against that, “jaundiced, biased, negative” is a pile-on of adjectives that does two things at once: it paints editors as ideologues and it suggests that skepticism itself is evidence of prejudice. That’s the move. If the newsroom questions the war’s progress, motives, or human cost, Morris invites the reader to interpret critique as hostility toward “events” rather than scrutiny of power.

Context matters. The Iraq War was an inflection point for media trust: round-the-clock cable, early internet forums, the rise of partisan talk ecosystems, and a public primed by Vietnam-era media myths on one side and post-9/11 unity rhetoric on the other. Embedding did produce vivid, immediate reporting - and also a structurally sympathetic vantage point, reliant on military access and narratives. Morris leverages that tension, but resolves it in a politically useful direction: networks didn’t lose audiences because the information landscape fractured; they lost them because they were “negative.”

It’s less diagnosis than argument: a blueprint for delegitimizing mainstream gatekeepers by recasting editorial judgment as cultural contempt.