Polls show that a sizeable portion of the American population believes that troops found WMD in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11. Even after the 9/11 Commission Report and numerous other reports have concluded that our intelligence was flawed, people in the freest nation on earth continue to be misinformed about something that could not be more vital to understand--the reasons for sending troops into harm's way. This insightful analysis argues that the media should have done a better job of performing its traditional role of skeptic and watchdog, and it examines what went wrong.