The difference between grief and knowledge

Item the first: The always wrong Maureen Dowd, writing about Cindy Sheehan: "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." Item the second: The MSM is now very excited about another family that has lost a child in Iraq and is now giving the President foreign policy advice. Why does the MSM seem to confuse grief with knowledge? These families surely understand grief, as well they should, and I don't challenge them on that. I do not see, however, that their personal loss automatically confers upon them the type of knowledge about complex foreign policy issues, so that our entire government should defer to them on these subjects. It's beyond irksome to see the MSM giving them platforms as if they have oracular insight into matters that cannot possibly be within their purview.