Old tradition, new tradition

Inayat Bunglawala, in a post about the British press and the Iraq war, speaks of the Observer as being 'a paper with a fine liberal tradition'. He seems, however, to have missed an important element of what the liberal tradition is, finding it a matter for regret that, as well as newspapers that opposed the war, there were newspapers that supported it. These should, he thinks, have been 'encouraging our MPs to rebel against the party whips who were demanding they vote in parliament in support for war'; that was their duty to the public (at least so long as we haven't 'disabused ourselelves' of the idea of their having such a duty).

I can understand that Bunglawala thinks the Iraq war was wrong. Harder to understand is how he can believe that all newspapers should have taken the same view as he did. Perhaps it's just that he can't accommodate the notion of there being reasonable differences of opinion on this question - like a good number of other opponents of the war. It's becoming quite a tradition, in fact.