War & Peace Quote by Ed Harris

Ed Harris is pointing to a moment when deference replaced skepticism, and the cost was measured in war. After George W. Bush took office and especially in the months following 9/11, the administration began building a case for invading Iraq around claims of weapons of mass destruction and implied links to terrorism. Rather than rigorously testing those claims, many major outlets repeated them with a veneer of certainty, elevating official narratives over contradictory evidence from UN inspectors and dissenting experts. Harris registers disbelief at how quickly that credibility was granted, and his continued refusal to accept it speaks to a broader frustration with institutional failure.

Several forces converged to make skepticism scarce. The post-9/11 atmosphere created a powerful rally-around-the-flag pressure that blurred the line between questioning policy and appearing unpatriotic. Access-driven journalism rewarded proximity to power and anonymous sourcing while discouraging adversarial reporting. Corporate media incentives favored dramatic, confident stories over nuanced uncertainty. Cable news embraced flag graphics and countdown clocks, and dissenting voices were marginalized or framed as fringe, even when they came from seasoned diplomats, weapons inspectors, or veterans of the first Gulf War.

Harris’s critique aligns with later retrospectives in which leading newspapers and networks acknowledged shortcomings in their prewar coverage. Yet the persistence of his bafflement matters. Hindsight does not fully explain why basic journalistic disciplines were suspended precisely when they were needed most. His words read as a plea for institutional memory and a warning: when the stakes are life and death, the press must interrogate power rather than launder it, and audiences must be alert to how consensus can harden through repetition rather than proof. Memory is part of accountability. Remembering how doubt was sidelined is a first step toward resisting the next rush to certainty.