Blogosphere: Mass Media are Change Amplifiers
It's a good time to specifically note one built-in bias of mass media, particularly the real-time variety. They have been created by monkeys, for monkeys. Monkeys like us naturally focus on change. Change is where threat might come from, change is where food might come from, or maybe even sex. The mass media are a finely honed, market evolved system that has templated itself onto our own genetically evolved perceptions.
What you see on the tube is not the state of the world, it's the rate. It's not an 'expression of anxiety' when the view of the war swings precipitously day by day, it's reporters and talking heads who can't perceive the water where they swim. Day-to-day, overemphasizing change sells commercials and papers. In times like this, it's a disservice. A good time to turn off the talking heads. Focus on the state of things. Check the map at StrategyPage. Where the troops are located, that's a state variable. Look at a media view that's filtered by military professionals. Those are the events that a trained eye picks to actually affect the state of things. Then use your own head.
The blogosphere is being hammered in the forge along with Iraq. Things change fast in war. GW I made the 'Scud stud' and CNN. Now CNN carries the URL for Salam Pax. Too early to tell where we're going - we're at the cusp, in the singularity. But I like the feel of it. Nick Denton says in the NYT article above:
"It's standard Weblog style when everybody's enthusiastic to say, `Wait a minute, war is ugly,' .... So when talking cable heads start to get gloomy, the Weblogs' natural tendency is to say, `Well, it was always going to be difficult.'
I hope and think he could make a stronger statement. That it's not just style. That perhaps this medium can do more than just keep the monkey watching, that we can also keep our eye on the actual state of the world.
Update: Den Beste has an excellent post that is the flip side of this one: How our military may be exploiting the media's monkey instincts to distract from things that matter, likely because the enemy could do something about them. He cites an Israeli article where some military professionals lay out what can and can't be discerned from the reporting so far.