In the eighties and nineties, I was a devoted reader of the Economist. It was my primary source for news (having long before given up on the pablum offered up by Newsweek and Time). But things like this are the reason that I no longer am. It would be nice if we could once again get a classically liberal news magazine.

Maybe I’m just reading more than I should from his review, but Michael Medved doesn’t seem impressed with “Redacted”:

I am actually one of the few people in the country who has seen the new movie. It is called “Redacted” … And let me just tell you, before I go to actually reviewing it: It could be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I mean, the out and out worst, most disgusting, most hateful, most incompetent, most revolting, most loathsome, most reprehensible cinematic work I have ever encountered. This is having reviewing movies for more than 25 years. [It] covers a lot of disgusting ground, but none more disgusting than ‘Redacted,’ which portrays the Marine Corps, one of the finest organizations ever assembled by human beings, portrays the U.S. Marine Corps, as corrupt, vicious, racist killers and rapists … (snip) …

It portrays the members of our Marine Corps in the most disgusting way imaginable. They hang out in barracks, drunk or stoned, with Confederate flags all over the place. And the head Marine, who is the leading rapist and murderer, is a big fat guy, I mean, hugely out of shape, right – just the typical Marine (sarcastic) – Marines tend not to look like that – big fat guy, overhanging belly, cigar-chomping, loud-mouthed, sort of fair-complexion. His name is Rush. Nothing in movies is an accident. They’re clearly trying to indict and smear Rush Limbaugh by saying that secretly he wants to rape and abuse 14-year old girls and murder them and then burn their bodies … (snip) …

The film is atrociously acted. It’s incredibly badly done … (snip)

But why listen to him? He’s just a wingnut…

Last night on Brit Hume, he showed some polling results indicating that Iraq was no longer the first news item that jumped to peoples’ minds when thinking of what was news:

The extent to which the success of the troop surge in Iraq has driven the war off the front pages is clearly illustrated in a new survey.

The Pew Research Center reports just 16 percent of respondents say Iraq is the first news story that comes to mind now. That’s down from 55 percent in mid-January.

In fact, 33 percent say there is now too little coverage of the war

Well, if anyone should have a time machine to the future, it should be the Instapundit! (Hint: if you don’t get the joke, follow his link. No, not that one–the second one…)

Shannon Love has a useful comment in yesterday’s post (that I’ve slightly edited here for typos) about war reporting (and public perceptions):

I find it very odd that most lay people, like journalists, have no intuitive feel for the ebb and flow of war. I think this lack of intuitive feel arises because the vast majority of the population never study the history of warfare in any detail and therefore develop their intuitive understanding of “feel” of flow of war purely from its representation in popular fiction and media.

The common narrative structure of the common fictional war story bears little relation to the actual tempo and evolution of real wars. A literature professor of mine once observed that no author would have written a fictional WWII that unfolded in the same way as the actual conflict. The opening of the war with sweeping unexpected victories makes for a good story but the slow grinding down of the Fascist states by overwhelming force in the last two years of the conflict is emotionally unsatisfying. In a fictional WWII, Fascist victory would look all but certain until Americans created the atomic bomb in last great gasp of desperation and saved the day.

The other problem with fictional war is that people can experience it in its entirety from start to finish in a matter of days or weeks. I think this causes people to intuitively feel that real world wars run far to0 long and are thus failures.

In short, persistence and determination make for boring narratives. Wars won by time don’t make good stories. Most of the significant battles of the pre-industrial era were sieges won by the side with the most patience and the best logistical management. How many popular depictions of sieges have you ever seen in the fiction or even in histories of the era? If you have seen a siege depicted you see it at its dramatic end, not the months or years of siege itself.

Law enforcement often complains that the time frames depicted on crime shows, in which cops solve murders in a matter of days, severally distorts the expectations of crime victims and even juries when they evaluate how competently the justice system acts.

I think the same effect cripples the electorate’s popular understanding of how we fight real wars.

This no doubt a factor, though the fact that very few of today’s journalists have any military experience or training is a problem as well.

The idiotic media explanations for the poor box-office performance of the anti-American films on the Iraq war are cluelessly hilarious. But the many commenters are happy to explain it to them.

It would be quite gratifying to see a pro-American Iraq war movie made, and have it clean up at the box office. I’d pop some popcorn to see into what kinds of logical pretzels the media types would contort themselves in a pathetic attempt to explain it.

Taylor Dinerman thinks that solar power is the answer to China’s future electric power woes:

While China may turn to widespread use of nuclear power plants, the Communist Party leadership is certainly aware of the role that glasnost and the Chernobyl disaster played in the downfall of another Communist superpower. Thus, China may be reluctant to rely heavily on nuclear power plants, at least not without strong safety measures, thus making them more expensive and more time consuming to build. Wind power and terrestrial solar power will not be able to contribute much to meeting China

An interesting post, and a lot of interesting (and validating) comments about the intergenerational clash between old and new media within the newsrooms. Ed Driscoll has further thoughts.

I remember a few years ago, when I first started writing pieces for on-line publications, that the editors I was dealing with viewed the web as a foreign land. They initially requested pieces in Microsoft Word, with instructions as to where to put the links, that they could edit and then hand off to their “web people” to put on line. Note that these were not original pieces, but supposedly the best of my blog posts for the time period in question. What they were asking was for me to take the HTML (the native language of the original posts), and convert it to Word, so they could then reconvert it back to HTML (with all the potential for screwups therein). It took a while to persuade them to simply accept my HTML in the first place (since they didn’t even understand what HTML was–that was one of those “techie” terms, that they let their “techies” handle).

When it’s criticism of those reporting it:

As I understand it, your measure of worth is how many front page stories you have written and unfortunately some of you will compromise your integrity and display questionable ethics as you seek to keep America informed. This is much like the intelligence analyst whose effectiveness was measured by the number of intelligence reports he produced. For some, it seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the “collateral damage” you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct.

Given the near instantaneous ability to report actions on the ground, the responsibility to accurately and truthfully report takes on an unprecedented importance. the speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry. An Arab proverb states – “four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the neglected opportunity.” Once reported, your assessments become conventional wisdom and nearly impossible to change. Other major challenges are your willingness to be manipulated by “high-level officials” who leak stories and by lawyers who use hyperbole to strengthen their arguments. Your unwillingness to accurately and prominently correct your mistakes and your agenda-driven biases contribute to this corrosive environment. All of these challenges combined create a media environment that does a tremendous disservice to America. Over the course of this war tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats for America because of the tremendous power and impact of the media and by extension you the journalist.

More thoughts here.

[Update on Monday]

I edited the transcript above to get it out of all caps, and correct a couple minor grammatical issues, since it does seem to be a transcript of a spoken speech.

When it’s criticism of those reporting it:

As I understand it, your measure of worth is how many front page stories you have written and unfortunately some of you will compromise your integrity and display questionable ethics as you seek to keep America informed. This is much like the intelligence analyst whose effectiveness was measured by the number of intelligence reports he produced. For some, it seems that as long as you get a front-page story there is little or no regard for the “collateral damage” you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct.

Given the near instantaneous ability to report actions on the ground, the responsibility to accurately and truthfully report takes on an unprecedented importance. the speculative and often uninformed initial reporting that characterizes our media appears to be rapidly becoming the standard of the industry. An Arab proverb states – “four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past, the neglected opportunity.” Once reported, your assessments become conventional wisdom and nearly impossible to change. Other major challenges are your willingness to be manipulated by “high-level officials” who leak stories and by lawyers who use hyperbole to strengthen their arguments. Your unwillingness to accurately and prominently correct your mistakes and your agenda-driven biases contribute to this corrosive environment. All of these challenges combined create a media environment that does a tremendous disservice to America. Over the course of this war tactically insignificant events have become strategic defeats for America because of the tremendous power and impact of the media and by extension you the journalist.

More thoughts here.

[Update on Monday]

I edited the transcript above to get it out of all caps, and correct a couple minor grammatical issues, since it does seem to be a transcript of a spoken speech.