Messages for and from the media

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Two unrelated news items in the last week hint at a developing challenge to rational policy-making: 1) the confusing accounts of what happened in Basra, Iraq; and, 2) the New York Times story yesterday reporting that CBS is considering buying CNN's news gathering rather than gather some news itself.

The almost complete guesswork of what happened in Basra, and why, was the result of a lack of reasonably reliable reporting. As the Weekly Standard impeccably described the problem in an article by Fredrick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan: "There has been much speculation about what happened in Basra itself: about possible deals between Maliki and Sadr, about the benefits Sadr or Maliki might have received from the encounter, and about Maliki's motivations. Because British forces... have abandoned the city, there were few coalition forces present and very few Westerners at all. Most of the details of the operation publicized in the American press come from Iraqi stringers, the usual anonymous Iraqi officials, and, it seems, some Sadrist media outlets... Such information is of limited value. We simply do not yet know how well the ISF acquitted itself in the actual fighting, what if any areas were cleared, who was resisting, and so on."

Yet despite the absence of any objective knowledge about what had happened, pro and antiwar news organizations, talk-radio shows, columnists, pundits and bloggers leaped into the void — invincibly ignorant of what had happened — and immediately began making powerful arguments in support of their pre-existing positions. In the middle of a vital presidential election season millions of American voters got misinformed on perhaps the central issue of the election that is critical to our national safety (whether misinformed for or against the war we don't yet know).

Hair-trigger-released propaganda untempered by even the existence of any objective facts which might be weighed in the balance is the epistemological culture in which presidential candidates, the media and voters are making their vital decisions.

This method of policy concluding is right out of Alice in Wonderland: " 'Let the jury consider their verdict,' the King said, for about the 20th time that day.

'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first, verdict afterwards.' 'Stuff and nonsense!' said Alice loudly. 'The idea of having the sentence first!' 'Hold your tongue!' said the Queen, turning purple.

'I won't!' said Alice.

'Off with her head!' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice."

Decide whether the battle is won or lost, whether the war should be abandoned or not before we even know what happened. Admittedly, this is an extreme case of news ignorance driving political debate and its derivative policy decisions. But it is a harbinger of things to come.

Consider that second news story I mentioned, the New York Times story from yesterday which reported: "CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN... Broadly speaking [there were] conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening New anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feed."

This is only an extreme example of a seemingly inexorable trend. Collecting news is too expensive, so almost all news organizations are cutting back on news gathering. Every year, every month, every day more and more commentary and analysis are based on less and less actual news gathering. Often only one or two wire reports are the only real news. Everything else, as they say is mere commentary.

We can see in the Basra event an extreme example of the kind of danger that — at a more incremental and less obvious way — is increasingly happening to our news. The ever more constricting economic forces tightening around the feasibility of effective news gathering may lead to a crisis of current event epistemology: In the future we may not know enough about events to make rational decisions.

This is not a liberal problem or a conservative problem. This is a threat to an even potentially informed electorate. Public knowledge is the first barricade against tyranny. (Gun ownership is a necessary, and very close, second.) We have all seen the shocking bias of certain Reuters and AP reporters. As news gathering further shrinks to such minimal levels, the light of knowledge will go out. Even now, it flickers from time to time. Basra was an early warning.