Writing in the The Australian Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal says that while "the cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history", journalists have failed miserably at connecting the dots over the last 30 years or so:

Remember Japan Inc? If you were a semi-sentient consumer of news in the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the impression that Japan would soon overtake the US in global economic clout, if its corporations didn't just purchase the country outright. Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz and other soi-disant experts pronounced sagely on the invincible Japanese model of industrial organisation, while the media supplied a diet of stories about how companies such as Sony or Honda remained world-beaters, year in and year out.

Now consider the amazing media about-face in recent weeks on Iraq. Before January 30, dateline Baghdad was dateline Gotterdammerung. Now it's dateline Democracy. Bombs are still exploding, but we aren't reading much any more about how we're losing hearts and minds or how Iraq is ethnically too fractious to have a meaningful democracy. Instead, the media connects the dots between elections in Baghdad and events in Beirut, Cairo and Ramallah, and talks about 1989.

It's right that they should do so. But we should also connect the dots between today's Iraq and '80s Japan. The myth of Japan Inc took hold because there was so little Western reporting to suggest that not all was well with the Japanese economy. So, when Japan's real-estate bubble burst and the economy flatlined for more than a decade, the world was caught unawares. The myth of an Iraqi quagmire took hold for similar reasons – the media was so busy telling the story of everything that was going wrong in Iraq that it broadly missed what was going right.

The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication.

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight – they can and usually do. Neither is it that the facts are obscure; often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts – facts with consequences – from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.

As Stephens notes, part of the problem is that so often, the people who get the narrative right before it happens have opinions or ideologies that clash with the conventional wisdom of the media's mindset:

It is, of course, impossible to anticipate events, in Harold Macmillan's sense of the word. But none of the examples listed here belong in that category. Norman Podhoretz predicted the peace process would lead to war. Charles Wolf saw the hollowness of Japan Inc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. And George W. Bush understood, and said, that a free Iraq would serve as a beacon of liberty for the oppressed Arab world.

Steven F. Hayward used Moynihan as a Cassandra figure in Volume I of The Age of Reagan. Moynihan was almost always right--and almost always ignored by his own party. Speaking of the Gipper, author Peter Schweizer makes a compelling case that he staked virtually his entire post-Hollywood career--and obviously, his entire post-gubernatorial career on one premise. As Reagan told former Nixon national security advisor Richard Allen in 1978:

My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic", Reagan told him, leaning back in his chair. "It is this: We win and they lose."

Imagine any reporter agreeing with anything that Reagan said. Or Bush #43. And we wonder why they can't get the narrative straight.