This paper focuses on actors of the press and their educational resources on behalf of which they were coping with the official war reasons having been disseminated in the wake of the Iraq war. The data sample consists of expert interviews with German journalists. The data are ‘measured’ against a normative guideline that draws on the educational concept of Kant in connection with the approach of interpretive explanations originating from Weber. Besides some typical factors in newsworthiness, the direct or limited adoption of the reasons in favour of war primarily seems to correlate with the editors’ basic policy lines. First and foremost due to corresponding structures of opportunities, the interviewed journalists were (not) able to enact their educational resources.