Rating the Coverage
Here's a story on a poll with some not-very-surprising results: people who oppose the Iraq war tend to think coverage of the war is biased in favor of the war. That's not a shock: the media is currently filled with images of war and stories of war - images the anti-war set finds offensive. And the reportage, at least in the American media, comes from Americans who, even if they seek to report objectively, are still reporting on the actions of American troops. A bit of pro-American bias is unavoidable, I would think. It's objective to show both the successes of the American troops and the setbacks - but even video of a Americans taking fire from Iraqi guerillas, or of a wounded American soldier talking on the cellphone with his wife back home in the states, is subtly pro-American simply because that's the side of the battle the video is showing.

There are, after all, no reporters "embedded" with Iraq's Republican Guard or the Fedayeen Saddam terrorist militia. Naturally, when an embedded reporter reports on his unit's encounter with the Fedayeen near Najaf, the report tilts in favor of the Americans.

The problem with embedded reporters isn't their natural tendency to bond with, and therefore report favorably on, the units they are covering. You can hardly blame NBC's David Bloom for reporting favorably on the actions of the armored units he's traveling with - deep down Bloom knows that if the unit he is embedded with loses a battle, Bloom may well lose his life. Iraqi fighters aren't likely to know or care that Bloom is a journalist rather than a soldier. To them, he's just another target. So forgive him if he refers to the Third Infantry Division as "our column."

No, the problem with embedded reporters is they present slices of life devoid of context. And television, which obsessively follows a formula of constantly looping through the same material, fails to provide the necessary context. MSNBC, while providing some good coverage, is also an example of the report-rinse-repeat approach to war coverage, offering updates every 15 minutes. The fact is, even as fast as the U.S. military has charged across Iraq, wars do not progress in 15-minute chunks. Hours can go by with nothing new to report, but the TV maw demands fresh material, and disgorges an endless stream of repeated video, recaps and talking heads - and those talking-head expert analysts, it should be noted, have biases.

Newspapers are handicapped in the opposite way. Walking past newspaper racks Tuesday carrying the Nashville City Paper and The Tennessean, I was strike by how stale the headlines were - especially on the Tennessean, which had a bold headline stating "Several Americans die in ambushes, trickery." But that had happened the day before. It wasn't happening now. The NCP's headline, "Push toward Baghdad," at least conveyed the sense of developing story. But the copy below the headline was stale. That’s not a knock on the City Paper or the Tennessean – they’re both just working with the traditional tools of the newspaper business, covering a 24-hour-evolving story with stories printed once a day, hours before reaching readers. Your hometown paper is similarly hamstrung, though some papers are doing a better job than others using the web to provide more complete and more-regularly updated coverage. Several papers are running Jeff Jarvis’ War in Iraq news weblog on their sites, a great service to their readers.

Newspapers tell us what happened yesterday. TV can tell us what is happening now. But even in a fast war, there's not always something big and newsworthy happening right now - at least not under the teeveenews definition of "big and newsworthy," which often means "we've got video of it." The best medium for following the war in Iraq is turning out to be the Internet. By checking both news websites and war-centric weblogs, readers can access both the latest breaking news from the battlefield and a level of cogent analysis that puts the TV talking-head experts to shame. TV gives you pictures of disconnected events, then gets talking heads to comment on them. But 30-second sound bites can't fully explain the context of what you're seeing live from the battlefield. Essays like this one from Austin Bay explain the overall strategy in a way Lester Holt or Peter Jennings can't. In a mere 1,422 words, Bay provides the context for the battlefield video from the embedded reporters. Now, when David Bloom tells you of the latest exploits of the

I think this piece in Editor & Publisher today has it about right regarding TV versus web new sites (though it leaves out the importance of independent weblogs):

When an event of the magnitude of the 9/11 terror attacks or the crash of the space shuttle Columbia occurs, the initial attention will likely be on TV news - for many more years to come. The consumer instinct is to turn on the TV to find out what's going on and see the first pictures. But after those initial minutes, there's a great opportunity for online news, and we saw that with the onset of this war, says Kinsey Wilson, vice president and editor-in-chief of USAToday.com. "Viewers first turn to television in part because TV's strength is the delivery of a narrative story line. That's what people are looking for when an event like this first begins to unfold," he says.

"Eventually, though, television starts to loop back on itself and repeats the narrative over and over again. I think that's where the web gains a huge advantage. The best sites can move quickly to develop a story in multiple directions, add depth and detail, and give readers their own pathways to explore." Wilson's point is dead on. Just because TV owns the first minutes (or hours) of major breaking news doesn't mean that web news sites can't either steal back or share the attention of news consumers relatively quickly.

For more on war blogs, see Mark Glaser's column in Online Journalism review. And to fully follow the war, turn off CNN occasionally and check out the Internet. Start here, of course - but don't stay here. Over on the right, I've got a list of "Vital Blogs." For war coverage, you really ought to check out several of them, including Donald Sensing, Instapundit, Blogs of War, Little Green Footballs, Winds of Change, Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing, Outside the Beltway, Command Post and The Truth Laid Bear. Pejman Pundit is good too - Pejman provides commentary from the perspective of an Iranian American. And Andrew Sullivan is providing excellent commentary too. Follow the links to those blogs - and then follow their links to other blogs, news articles and sources you may never have seen before. If you do, I guarantee it - the next time you find yourself watching the miasma of CNNMSNBCFoxNewsABCNBCCBS you'll be wondering how so many people could spend so much time telling you so little about what is really going on.