Samizdata's Iraq Correspondent has some pointed criticism of the media, and some good words for the blogosphere.
The difference between the media and the blogosphere is reinforced by the emphasis on pictures in the modern media, especially during the war itself. Every story must have a picture, and the reality is that with no picture, there is no story. The picture comes first, the story is then attached to the picture.
I can think of an example most of the readers will probably remember: The British Army has Basra surrounded and is making progress everywhere with very few casualties.
There is no picture to illustrate that. The most the media can show you is a picture of a couple of tired soldiers in a foxhole, because most of the time, that is what they were doing. Don't hold the front page. (Note: This is true. The soldiers were in a foxhole, and they were tired. But this tells you nothing about progress on Basra. This is like trying to understand what France looks like by being shown a picture of a street lamp in Bordeaux.)
Meanwhile, an American self-propelled gun has an ammunition accident and explodes. This is a great picture, and it will therefore be shown repeatedly. What you cannot show is the fact that this did not matter to the war effort. The Americans replace the kit. The barrage continues uninterrupted. Nothing important is illustrated by the picture that contributes to understanding of the situation. But, it is a great picture. And it is the picture that becomes the story, not the 'big picture', for which there is no actual picture.
Can you blame the media for this? They do this because people like to look at pictures and will 'buy' more news, if they are interesting to look at. The great advantage blogs have is that they do not have to sell their stories the same way. Therefore they can be more interested in telling the truth as they see it and fill in the niche that the media are leaving wide open.
My impression based on my experience of the Iraqi reality, media reporting and the blogosphere before and after my stay in Basra is that both people 'in the know' and people who care are starting to trust blogs more than they trust the mainstream media.
My problem with the media is that it assumes that citizens are either so stupid, so lazy, or so time-deprived that all they can handle are pictures. (Reminds me of how, in the movie version of Fahrenheit 451, the newspaper we see Montag reading has no words.) TV is the worst offender, but newspapers seem to be catching up. The problem with pictures is that they are not informative. They are designed to elicit an emotional reaction. That's what all the best photographs do. But news cannot be based on subjective emotion. It must be based on objective fact. Therefore, you must do it with words, or even better, with numbers. Sometimes the truth is better told by taking a few hours and writing 1,000 thoughtful words, rather than holding a shutter button down for two seconds, developing a photo for 10 minutes, and then spending 60 seconds composing a caption. But speed, simplicity, and emotion rule.
And here's what us bloggers are saying to the media: We don't want our news simple. We don't want our news fast. We don't want our news emotional. We want our news ACCURATE.
But accuracy doesn't sell. Simplicity sells. Simplicity frees up ad space and allows you to buy less paper in the case of newspapers, or in the case of TV, time to cover things like entertainment, sports, fashion: the junk food of television news, the stuff that brings in the real ratings.
Accuracy doesn't sell. Being fast sells. If you have the story first and scoop all your rivals, you sell more papers and more ads. More people watch your show than the other guy, which means you get more ad dollars.
Accuracy doesn't sell. Emotion sells. You tug at people's hearts, inflame their passions, and stroke their egos, you get them hooked. They will watch.
So accuracy, because it doesn't sell, is forgotten. But if news stories are not accurate, and the people who report them are not accurate, they fail.
Take Florida in 2000. The whole night, all of the networks were falling ass over teakettle trying to be the first ones to predict the outcome and declare a winner. They had the exit polls flying off the wires (all controlled by one media-created collective, the Voter News Service, because God forbid the media would actually spend money on accuracy), the predictor computers a-hummin' away, the pundits yammering away, all trying to get a quick and easy answer for mass consumption as soon as possible.
They ran headlong into chaos theory. (Yes, I'm shamelessly ripping off Jurassic Park. No mail, please.) The crux of chaos theory is that seemingly simple systems can yield complex and unpredictable results. Take the weather, for example: It's sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, windy, rainy, or snowy, at any one place in time. But how does the weather at that one place, at that one time, get to that simple result? It's complex: Ocean currents, jet streams, barometric pressure, so many variables that it takes a computer model to keep them all straight. And even then, sometimes it doesn't come out accurately. Or the stock market, an even simpler result: Either the market is up, or it is down. A binary choice; up/down, yes/no, 1/0, on/off. The forces that make the markets go up and down are even more numerous than the factors affecting weather. If the weather is affected by a thousand things, than the market is influenced by billions of things. Corporate earnings. New Products. Deals. Personnel issues. Analyst reports. Even rumors. It's so complex that modelling it, even semi-reliably like we can with the weather, is beyond the limit of our present information technology. Simple things aren't so simple.
An election is the media's dream. It is a simple system, either Dude A wins or Dude B wins. It is not only simple, it is over in one night, and it is filled with emotion and rhetoric and sound bites and all sorts of things that media people love. It is, in short, the perfect story for the media.
Except when it isn't.
You saw it for yourself that night, almost three years ago. Predictions started going wrong. The election returns didn't match what the exit polls and predictive computer models were saying. Both candidates won states that conventional wisdom said they should not have won. (Bush winning West Virginia and Tennessee, and Gore winning New Mexico and Pennsylvania, for example; all were thought to be safe or near-safe bets for the other side.) Judges interfered with the predictions as well, holding polling places open longer than had been anticipated. Even the media itself may have unintentionally interfered; by predicting winners in Eastern states, they may have contaminated polling that was still occuring in Western states, convincing people that one side or another had already won, and that the election had already been decided, which some people interpreted as a reason not to go vote. This even happened within states broken up into two different time zones, and thus with two poll-closing times (i.e. Florida, which the networks called for Gore while the polls were still open in the Panhandle, a prediction which they later had to retract.)
And it was in Florida that the system finally ground to a halt. Even after all these problems, and a close election, the media thought they had their simple, binary result, namely, Bush winning. They had even driven Gore to the point of concession. Then, a few of Gore's poll workers noticed a discrepancy between the media reports and the election returns in Florida, and convinced Gore to pull back at the last minute.
The media had rushed to get the story. And they rushed because they had assumed they would get a simple result, on their fast schedule, on their emotional terms. Even if they had to use inaccurate modelling to get it a little bit faster, or omit a real vote total here or there, or get caught up in the emotion of the moment to fill air time, no one would know the difference.
Needless to say, that didn't happen. We didn't get a yes/no, 1/0, Bush/Gore answer. Instead, we just got a collective "What the hell?"
Simple answers are complex. Fast answers are usually wrong. And emotion is not an answer at all.
But blogs don't care about being simple, or emotional, or even fast. They put accuracy first. Everything else follows. Because the blogger who forgets accuracy gets a reputation for being inaccurate, the blogger who lets his emotions run ahead of his facts gets a sound fisking, and the blogger who puts out bad posts, no matter how fast, is ignored.
And how does one tell the best blogs? The hits. More hits mean more people are reading your work. The better and more accurate a blog's analysis, no matter how fast, how emotional, or how simple, the more hits they get.
The proprietors of Stop The Bleating, before they became lawyers, were both U.S. Marines. They had on their website, at least until a few days ago, a "Blogger's Creed," a hillarious (and thought-provoking) send-up of the Marine Corps' Rifleman's Creed. (Through the Miracle of the Google cache, I managed to get a copy, which I have listed as an extended entry.) Here's the relevant part:
My blog knows nothing, because it is just an arrangement of electrons on a little piece of silicon somewhere, but I know that what counts in blogging is not merely the number of posts I blog, the force of my rhetoric, nor the smoke I blow. I know that it is the hits that count. I will get hits...
...I will keep my blog fresh, interesting and up-to-date, even when I am not. I must make my blog ever better. I will...
Bloggers never assume that citizens are either so stupid, so lazy, or so time-deprived that all they can handle are quick blurbs, emotional pictures, and stories utterly devoid of context and real analysis. Bloggers don't assume that the masses are stupid. They come from the masses. They live among the masses. They ARE the masses. Consequently, their perspective is different from the elite media. Which means they understand things in ways that the media simply cannot. And the sheer number of bloggers means that all perspectives are represented, and all biases can be accounted for and countered, and that the best analysts get the reputation for being the best, and become guideposts for all the others. For all the talk of how journalists are there to report the truth, they haven't been, for reasons of bias, ignorance, snobbery, or stupidity. Thus, the task of truth falls to the blogosphere.
Weblogs... the invention that saved journalism?
Why not? It's not like we could do any worse than the media does.
Extended Entry: The Blogger's Creed (Not really offensive, except to Marines who take themselves way too seriously...)
UPDATE 9/30/03 -- I am reliably informed from the proprietors of Stop the Bleating that only one of their current two blog authors was a Marine. (And thanks for the blogroll, guys!)
The Blogger's Creed
by Matt Rustler
This is my blog.
There are many like it but this one is mine. My blog is my favorite diversion. But it is not my life. If I do not master it as I master my life, nothing catastrophic will happen.
My blog, without me, is boring and will eventually be deleted, even from the Google cache. Without my blog, I am just a guy with an opinion, like I was before I started blogging. I must blog with wit, or at least with a point. I must entertain and illuminate better than other bloggers, or they will get more hits and I will become irrelevant. I must make them irrelevant. I will....
My blog knows nothing, because it is just an arrangement of electrons on a little piece of silicon somewhere, but I know that what counts in blogging is not merely the number of posts I blog, the force of my rhetoric, nor the smoke I blow. I know that it is the hits that count. I will get hits ...
My blog is inanimate and intangible, unlike me, and I'd have to be pretty pathetic to say it was my life. But I like it anyway, so I will learn blogging well. I will learn the art of Fisking, the value of a clever caption, how to do cool things in my template using HTML I ripped off from others' websites using "reveal code," and the art of weaseling a link from Instapundit or one of the other blog-gods.
Before God I swear this creed. My blog and myself are the defenders of my delusions of grandeur. We are the masters of the blogosphere. We are the saviors of my sense of self-worth.
So be it, until victory is mine and I get all the hits.
Posted by Thief at September 27, 2003 08:26 PM