Via Chris Hayes, Radar has a clever article evaluating the financial fortunes of the war's most enthusiastic media backers. It won't exactly astonish anyone to learn that great folly didn't throw them into the poorhouse, but the relationship between wrongness and riches is a bit more unseemly than even I'd realized.
This sort of thing is, of course, endemic to the industry, where eloquently articulating what everyone else believes to be right is a far more lucrative strategy than actually being right. It's as Galbraith said, "[i]n any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone." Some big-name folks have actually expressed to me their fear that, had they spoken out, their prominent gigs would've evaporated with the first burst of invective.
Even so, I'm a bit surprised that the media hasn't done a bit more to superficially correct for their mistakes after the fact. That Time has decided to make a play for renewed relevance by hiring Kristol and Beinart is nuts -- what about elevating someone who got the war right, and trying to learn from their thought processes? I'm not one for drumming the wrong out of the business (no pundit has, or ever will have, perfect accuracy), but the idea that you rapidly reward the wrongheaded and never promote prescient new voices is genuinely grotesque, and the recipe for a sclerotic, uninteresting punditocracy.