Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landay were two of the very few journalists who—when it came time for America to make a decision about war on Iraq—turned out to be right about the war and the deceptions coming from the White House.

In a 10-minute portion (youtube) of PBS’s “Democracy on Deadline“, Stroebel and Landay talk about the web of lies that caught both the Washington Post and the New York Times in 2002 and early 2003. Along with almost all of the mainstream media at that time, the WP and NYT highlighted the dubious information released by the Bush administration and side-lined questions about the sources of that information. On the other hand, Stroebel and Landay (of Knight Ridder) risked their credibility—and lost a few nights of sleep—trying to get the truth from a veiled and highly secretive group of coordinated public opinion setters (i.e. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice). Says Stroebel:

I… became aware that there was actually this group in the government, in the Pentagon, in the vice-president’s office and elsewhere, who was trying to make their own foreign policy separate and distinct from what we thought foreign policy was. It was almost like a shadow government.

And Landay:

I think that there was a failure on the part of the American press akin to the intelligence failure perpetrated by the American government when it came to Iraq. And that failure was, bottom line, that the mainstream press for the most part failed to do its job.

These guys definitely get a place on my credible news sources list.