Well, what does that buy the listener if a lot of British citizens are WRONG? To that question we would expect to hear the Pontius Pilate challenge, "What is truth?"
That is all very well, in the fog of current events--but we can look back and critique journalism with hindsight. In retrospect, the dreadful sandstorm "bogged down" the coalition not at all. It simply gave the Iraqi army the illusion of safety, under "cover" of which they moved their forces. They thus revealed their locations to our radar and subjected themselves to uttter devastation by aerial assault.
Peter Arnet had the same defense; he claimed that his description of the "difficulties" our forces were faced with was simply the consensus of what journalists in Baghdad were saying. And that was a slightly less negative perspective of coalition progress than "Comical Ali" was promulgating on Iraqi TV. BUT IT DID NOT CORRESPOND TO REALITY ON THE GROUND. Anyone who didn't know that then has been in denial for a long time if they don't know it now.
Journalism systematically averts its gaze from the trail of fatuous errors it has made by systematically discounting what conservative people (e.g., military commanders) have told them. Journalism is the establishment in America, to the extent that it is able to systematically divert our attention from its errors.
Many closed-minded people take for granted that journalism is the pursuit of truth; it is not. Journalism is the pursuit of ratings via nonfiction entertainment. And that makes journalism essentially as superficial and self-important as the rest of the entertainment industry.
Urban legends are circulated on the Internet by people who find the stories too good to be passed up--but the same mechanism exists among journalists. The fact that those same stories are too good to be true is, in their thinking, beside the point. Apparently the "McCarthy era" myth fits that bill precisely; the story of the fearless journalists facing down the ruthless right-wing crackpot is so flattering to journalism that no journalist can resist it.
It seems to strike most historians the same way. But, according to Ann Coulter, all historical accounts of "McCarthyism" rely on the same "secondary sources" as the original journalism did. In other words, the whole thing is an urban legend.