Link: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/12/18/suskind_empiricism.html#comments

...about the subtle but very important difference between the words realism and reality. The latter word became notorious after the 2004 elections when it was recast as part of the phrase "reality-based community" used by many progressive bloggers. Realism is a word that has taken root since the publication of the ISG report, because of the perception that many of the people involved in the report's creation are foreign policy realists - a currently attractive contrast to the Neo-Conservatives, who are currently suffering a credibility problem since more and more people realized that Iraq has become a quagmire.
At the heart of the problem is that the Bush administration has been tripped up by its own foreign policy hubris. Whichever way you dress up the verbiage, the current mess in Iraq was not difficult to predict- except that all contrary views were ignored, marginalized, abused and otherwise buried in the aftermath of 9/11.
Once again, the mainstream media are partially culpable due to their habit of uncritically repeating administration talking points, and the continuing presence on the airwaves of numerous political commentators whose credibility and those of the broadcast networks are so intertwined that both they and the networks have identical current objectives. Those objectives are to maintain some perception of credibility at all costs.
We are seeing many of those commentators continue to either perpetuate the same thought processes that got the USA into a mess in Iraq (including the continued repetition of implausible memes such as "Democrats are weak on national security"), or to change position while denying that any position change has really occurred (using classic techniques such as obfuscation, doublespeak, and reliance on general amnesia in the population).
I have little respect for people who never admit to error. The mainstream media's credibility for me continues to hover somewhere between zero and squat. Their entire process for reporting on what is going on in the world today is broken, yet they either have not noticed this, or they are unable to face the changes that will be necessary to improve it.