Good Bleating

James Lileks describes listening to a WWII era news broadcast:

...the radio show has reports from correspondents all over the world, and the tone is rather restrained -- pro-Allies, of course, but no shrieking and shouting about the need for TOTAL WAR to SMASH THE JAPS. If anything, they're boring: lots of detailed explanation about what is happening and why, and what it means.

There's no equal time for Republicans who disagreed with the course of the war. Listening to the report, it's almost impossible to imagine them switching over to a report on people opposed to the war. It's not that there weren't such people, of course -- but after 17 minutes of discussions of the situation in Europe and North Africa and the Pacific and how the island landings would affect Japanese sub deployments and resource allocation, a report from an isolationalist rally in Cold Bumfark, Vermont just wouldn't seem particularly relevant.

It occurs to me from reding this that maybe a big part of the problem is that journalists don't do boring news very well anymore. Think about it. Imagine reporting on World War II, a series of events that would seem to be anything but boring. But I've read a lot of books of that particular war, and never have those books been anything like a straightforward day-by-day chronicle of the war. And by day-by-day, I mean fill-up-a-newspaper or radio show length accounts of the fighting, every day. Such accounts required a lot of material, much of it pretty dull.

But the journalists tried to be as comprehensive as possible, to paint as accurate a picture as possible. They weren't trying to break the big story or find the big scandal, they were reporting the news. We need that out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Just straightforward reports about what the military was trying to do that day (or the day before), what they did, and what problems they might have faced. It might be boring, but it would help take the editorializing out of reporting, and it would give credibility back to reporters in the field.

That may seem unrealistic in the 24-hour news cycle and the need to get stories first, but I actually think that is why it would work. The reason bloggers are so successful in their dealings with the mainstream media is that they act as fact-checkers--gathering information well after the fact to correct the false impressions of initial reports. Imagine if the initial reports were done well the first time--if reporters actually took the time to report. Such reporting would give us an accurate depiction of the actual course of the war. We could base our opinions on that depiction, rather than spending our time questioning the fallacies of soundbites and journalists' motives. What a concept.