AUSTIN, Tx. -- Superpanel begins on "war pundits" with Greg Mitchell, Mark Danner, McJoan and Samantha Power, hosted by The Nation's Ari Melber.

Mark Danner: Coverage of the war "is drying up. ... What is happening is that the war itself has been transmogrified almost completely now from a story that was a reported story -- that is, argued about the facts -- to a story that is about opinion -- to a debate... and we're getting very little reporting." The press itself is transmogrifying into an opinion-based medium. Mostly good, but "a part of it is a very bad thing -- we increasingly get our news from cable news stations, which are for large part an opinion forum." He tells a surreal story about a pre-war Berkeley forum in which Christopher Hitchens says we needed to invade because "they struck us and we need to strike back" and the audience emitted a gutteral roar. 

Greg Mitchell:  Big shout to Steve Earle. "When I think of war pundit," he says, "I also think of Molly Ivins." Boos for Michael O'Hanlon. Ken Pollack went on the Daily Show "to tell us how to solve the problems of Iraq but the whole Middle East." Why do people think the phrase 'surge protectors' is funny? As a MEMBER of The Surge I have resisted calling our bodyguards that... No love in the press for the New York Times media-generals report. I'm not entirely sure about what Greg actually thinks about Afghanistan. "It is a myth that the New York Times and Washington Post ever apologized for their coverage of the war." Bottom line: Greg Mitchell doesn't like the way the war is covered -- "just one appalling statement after another" -- and is frustrated by how no one in the press cares.

McJoan: "I'm proud to be the dirtiest of all [panelists] by being a blogger." Word. The right has succeeded for decades in manufacturing a consensus that it's a Praetorian Guard for American national security. "They've acquired a monopoly on expertise... able to set the narrative on all foreign-policy debates." Bought-pundits story "should have been a game-changing revelation about the war, the debate and about the media... Inconvenient proof of the complicity of the media in [perpetrating] the administration's lies." Message matters, she says -- "it reinforces the same old narrative about Democrats and progressives being weak on national security" to dismiss the FISA cave-in or float the idea that Obama would make a Republican his SecDef.  She's really emotional, choked up, trying to get us to be "the Wurlitzer of the left that the right has had all along." Oh whoops it appears she has laryngitis.

Samantha Power:  Says a few words about Mark's "frozen scandal" idea -- when Dana Priest broke the black-sites story, they investigated Dana. When Jim Risen broke the warrantless-surveillance story, they investigated Jim. Says/assents to someone else's idea that Ken Pollack's future books should come with the equivalent of surgeon general's warnings. Asks that we should discipline our discourse on withdrawal "for the human consequences" and reject the idea out-of-hand "that the war in Iraq was a humanitarian operation." Also, look at the "potential downsides" about "our ability to select information around our pre-existing biases." God this woman is a paragon of integrity. I remember when I factchecked a piece of hers in a February 2003 issue of TNR about "Liberalism and American Power" in which she, alone among all contributors, opposed the war and for the right (IMHO) reasons about human rights, the lack of threat and the clear threat of the war to the international order... OK, back to the panel. "Liberal hawks" were unable to "distinguish the like from the unlike" in terms of accepting Bush's cynical pretext about the invasion of Iraq having a humanitarian component. She doesn't want to "throw the baby out with the bathwater and discredit humanitarianism" -- interesting that she's not saying humanitarian intervention as the name of the term. I wonder if she wants to elide that debate for now. ... Final challenge to the crowd: how do we avoid self-selection and preserve intellectual honesty? 

Sam and Tom Mattzie and a woman whose name I didn't catch get into a debate about liberal discussion of the human consequences of withdrawal for the Iraqi people. The lady-whose-name-I-don't-know asks Sam if suggesting withdrawal will have such consequences leads to a pretext for continuing the occupation. Sam, somewhat disappointingly at first, gives the meta as good as she gets, and intimates that the motivation for such a question is liberal intellectual dishonesty. Tom says to remember the framing here. Sam replies that by not addressing the prospect of humanitarian disaster, liberals allow the mantle of human rights, perversely, to go to endless-war to John McCain. I ask if including the voices of the Iraqi people might be the way out of this stale debate. Danner kind of agrees. McJoan: Iraqi viewpoints are out on blogs, and they're also in the international press. If Power addressed my point, an excited Moira Whelan stopped me from hearing what she said.