March 21, 2003 War News: Go Beyond the Usual Suspects
What follows is this Sunday's column. I've gotten permission to post it early, because it feels timely.
In the 1991 Gulf War, the American public was fed an a homogenized version of reality. The news consisted of the same sound bites, presidential declarations, Pentagon briefings, etc. -- essentially identical information no matter what the media source.
In the first 24 hours of the latest Gulf War, the same situation prevailed for the vast majority of Americans. This time around, however, a minority -- but a growing one -- had learned a lesson from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They had a robust online alternative. The World Wide Web, e-mail lists and other online sources offered content with context and nuance.
Maybe you didn't have time at the start of this war to check out the alternatives. In coming weeks and months, please make the time.
The amount of information this time is going to be overwhelming. Hundreds of professional journalists are in the Middle East covering the events, and the Web gives us access to most of what they're going to tell us.
Many are ''embedded'' in combat units. They'll provide all manner of on-the-ground reports, albeit censored, using modern communications technology that will shock us with its immediacy.
Some of the coverage will come from media that do not parrot the U.S. government's view of the conflict. In the weeks leading up to the war, when much of the American press dismissively covered internal dissent and mocked the rest of the world's misgivings as weak-kneed whining, many people started looking to British media for the kind of information and opinions they weren't finding here.
Several weeks ago, the London Observer broke a story of U.S. spying on the United Nations delegations of Security Council members. It quoted a memorandum by a National Security Agency official. The U.S. media organizations that bothered to cover the story downplayed it, but it was big news elsewhere -- and on the Web.
The rise of the passionate amateur, meanwhile, has given us valuable new insights. Nowhere is that more true than in weblogs and other kinds of personal media that transcend the soapbox genre. Collectively, they expand the marketplace of ideas.
Some webloggers serve a clearinghouse function, becoming a collaborative filter and conversation. They sort through the journalism, professional and amateur, and point the rest of us to the most interesting coverage.
I also subscribe to a number of mailing lists where other subscribers do much the same thing. They spot interesting new coverage, and tell everyone else on the list. I'm a big fan of Dave Farber and his “Interesting People” list; Farber's readers tell him about useful material and he tells everyone else.
The soapboxes have their own unique value. These are political weblogs that deal mostly with policy issues, with the war and international politics at the top of the current agenda. Sometimes they're the classic ''sound and fury, signifying nothing,'' but the best force us to reconsider our own biases. I frequently disagree with Glenn Reynolds, but his postings are always relevant, often enlightening.
The source and quality of information are as important online as in traditional media, but more difficult to verify in some cases. As I write this, meanwhile, there's a serious discussion online about the bona fides of a weblogger who says he's in Baghdad, telling us how things look to an Iraqi citizen. We're developing new hierarchies of trust for this new medium, just as we have for the traditional publications and broadcasts.
I don't know if the most deeply interactive nature of the Net will emerge fully in this war, not the way it will when information technology and networks are even more pervasive than they are today. We'll get a hint of it as on-the-ground journalists with fancy portable telecommunications gear give us their perspectives.
If you want to be informed, roam widely. Watch and read things that support your own beliefs. Then look for commentary and data that don't. It's all out there.
The need for a better-informed citizenry has never been greater, not in an era of such pivotal changes and world-shaping decisions. Yet there has rarely been such prevailing shallowness in public discourse.
Our business and political leaders know that reality is an infinite palette of grays, not starkly black and white. We know that, too, because we deal with those subtleties in your everyday life. Yet our leaders -- and, yes, major elements of the mass media -- reduce complex issues to simplistic slogans. Why do we go along with this?
I'm not asking you to change your mind on fundamental issues. But I implore you to use these new tools to keep it ajar.
• posted by Dan Gillmor 12:14 PM • permanent link to this item http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/
