[conservatism_IS_compassion]

In response to the controversy, the director of BBC News is acknowledging the difficulties in reporting the conflict with Iraq accurately.

"Nobody, including the media, has the full picture of what's going on," Richard Sambrook told the BBC's Breakfast program. "Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information. We're all trying to work out this jigsaw and what the overall picture is."

He added that fact verification was especially problematic with live, continuous coverage.

"The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't," he said.

IOW, when you get into "live, continuous coverage" you are essentially down to the level of rumor.

"The fog of war" is just a critical example of the general problem of the fog of current events, and in fact "live, continuous coverage" is a lot like an ink blot test--it tells you as much about what the reporter expects or desires as it does about reality on the ground. As the "live continuous coverage" prediction of GORE WINS FLORIDA illustrates . . .

And as that also illustrates, "live continuous coverage" of an election is illegitimate--it can affect the outcome it claims merely to report, e.g. by suppressing the turnout at the last minute in the Florida panhandle.

And the tendentiousness of the 2000 election coverage was notable in the fast calling of states for Gore compared to the slower calling of states for Bush, when the final margin of victory or defeat was comparable. The solution is not to improve "live continuous coverage" of elections, but to abolish it. Just as electioneering at a polling place was abolished, to create the secret ballot.

Is coverage of war favoring Saddam?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

It isn't true that you have to "get people to listen first." For a rather small number of people that is true; for the vast majority of people it isn't a very effective way to communicate with them. The mere fact that ideas are presented and are repeated changes the way people look at things. Like it or not, most people respond to emotionally-charged language, rather than subdued language with all of the corners knocked off.

And this is exactly what the Left does. They've managed to use the language so effectively that they control nearly all of the governments of the entire Western world. . .[and] they did it by using emotional appeals that we've all heard literally thousands of times.

IOW, liberals live and die by PR, and use the "Big Lie" technique. They are able to do so because journalists are liberals.

That sounds like tinfoil to a lot of people who aren't paying attention. But the best way to understand it is simply that journalists are people who can make money by being bigmouthed, and claiming preternatural knowledge and objectivity is just part of being bigmouthed. Actually being knowledgable and dispassionate are not job requirements, and indeed are qualities seldom found in journalists.

And political "liberalism" is best understood as the consequence of the nature of journalism. The unprincipled approach to getting along in politics is to go along with journalists. That is what Joe McCarthy did not do--and consequently they found it necessary to pull out all stops to destroy his reputation and effectiveness.

Andrew Sullivan: It’s all getting a little hysterical (Ann Coulter = Michael Moore)

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Journalists like to claim that journalism is "the first draft of history." And in the case of "the McCarthy era" in particular, Coulter indicates in Treason, historians do in fact promulgate a history which is nothing more than touched-up, glossed-over journalism.

It is however easy to show--see for example Slander and Treason--that journalism is as a matter of factual record heavily slanted toward liberalism.

Indeed liberalism can be viewed as a mere consequence of the natural tendency of free, competitive (but not to the extent of being willing to engage in flame wars to defend truth against a distortion of truth which makes a better story) journalism. IMHO liberalism is simply whatever makes a "good story", and political liberals operate on no other principle than to exploit the prevailing propaganda wind which that fact implies.

In no meaningful sense can you edit CNN's coverage of the Saddam Hussain regime into useful truth. Henry Ford famously said that "History is Bunk"; any history which is merely a second draft of journalism fits that description quite nicely.