Media backing off???
Mood: Meh...
Listening to: Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life
David Martin, a classy guy who covers the Pentagon for CBS, blogged recently about how he made a decision to not run a story about efforts the Army is using to beat improvised explosive devisces.
From Martin's comments:
"This week I killed a story about the battle against Improvised Explosive Devices after a senior military officer told me it contained information that would be helpful to the enemy. I didn’t find his argument about how it would help the enemy very persuasive, but because there’s a war on I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ve done that a number of times over the years, and each time it’s turned out that going with the story wouldn’t have caused any harm. It’s always a difficult decision, made more difficult by the fact that it always seems to happen late in the day when you’re under deadline pressure. When I killed the story on Thursday, it was 5:30 – an hour to air – and I left the Evening News broadcast without a lead story which they had been counting on all day. Not a good career move."
Now the media has taken a lot of crap over the years for doing their job. Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of the current Secretary of Defense, has been quoted as saying they have a job and so do folks like her husband who recently had strong words about the ability of folks to communicate effectively in a world where Al Qaeda uses every tool they can. Mr. Rumsfeld said this was going to be the way to go to win the information war when he was talking to the Council on Foreign Relations.
"The U.S. government will have to develop the institutional capability to anticipate and act within the same news cycle. That will require instituting 24-hour press operation centers, elevating Internet operations and other channels of communications to the equal status of traditional 20th Century press relations. It will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press, just as the publics of the U.S. and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principal source of information."
What Rumsfeld and Martin are both saying is the world is changing and so should the rules we use to judge both the government and media.
