Reason‘s Michael C. Moynihan makes the same point I angrily made here a few days ago:
Take a look around the blogosphere and it seems that, overnight, everyone’s a Kremlinoligist, everyone’s an expert on the Caucasus (I have followed the region closely for years—especially the post-Communist Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—but must concede that I too am just an interested observer, and am in no way an expert; just relaying interesting stuff from the wire services). And the responses to the invasion of Georgia, it seems to me, are merely Rorschach tests for certain bloggers and pundits’ own politics: If you’re on he left, you’re broadly sympathetic to Moscow; on the right, Georgia. So while the blogosphere is abuzz with those “debunking” the notion that Georgia is the aggrieved party, challenging the sinister “MSM’s” take on the conflict, the Russian military continues to move—today into the country’s second largest city Kutaisi and the port city of Poti—despite a ceasefire. At this point, I’ll leave the prognostications and insights into regional power politics to the experts.
My God, a pundit is thinking rationally about this conflict! Anyway, this is the best advice you can follow, though I would bemoan the wider group of political commentators and columnists, from Charles Krauthammer to Ralph Peters, to the National Review set constantly excerpted at the Small Wars Journal blog as if people who “identifies Democrats with dysfunctional urban areas” or work as a “corporate speechwriting consultant in New York” have anything useful to offer about the Caucasus or, for that matter, a small war.
Indeed, the political polarization of coverage and linkage was, and continues to be appalling. The usual suspects made the usual generic comments, and everyone referenced each other as if they were oh-so-innovative and getting at the real story. Pardon me while I yawn, media and mainstream blogosphere. We’ve seen better from you.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
{ 14 comments }
I agree, broadly, with your frustrations. But is this so different than everyone becoming an expert on terrorism after 9/11?
9/11 did trigger many Americans to educate themselves about the Middle East, but developing true expertise takes years.
For bloggers I think the instinct to make a quick comment on breaking news will usually trump the desire to educate themselves to the point of expertise — but that’s something that blogging and MSM have in common.
I think the best point you make, Foust, is that almost all these instant-experts fall neatly into a either-or point of view. Its a interesting US fallacy, that all subjects must be debated as if it was a competition between debating teams and not real-life complex matters. There seems to be a need for black and white thinking, and a penchant for moralism: Someone has to be right and someone wrong in all matters.
These are not the instances in hill-wars, wich is basically what this was until the russians went in decisivly and with overwhelming force. This is not the instance in ASfghanistan either, as far as I can understand, where the different quwams may have different motivations and the hate of the neighbour and all who stand in the way of getting even with said neighbour most of the times far outshines the geopolitical, strategic and tactical considerations. The genius of men like Putin and Sarqawi is that they are able to shape these local hilbilly conflicts into a larger force, pushing and prodding here and there in order to get momentuum for their own larger strategic ideas. In this day of the internet, it seems that all too many are trying to fit events ibnto some over-riding storyline, some macro-narrative while in reality the world is made up of micronarratives who gradually become a macro-narrative seen through the lense of history. SOme few players have the skill to directly shape the micros into coherent policies, and some few commentators have the skill to both analyze the different sets of parameters inside the various micros and draw paralels while notig differences. The US seems to be sorely lacking in this respect, with a childlike need for straight lines and big enemies. Is it possible for a nation to get PTSD?
I think the best point you make, Foust, is that almost all these instant-experts fall neatly into a either-or point of view. Its a interesting US fallacy, that all subjects must be debated as if it was a competition between debating teams and not real-life complex matters. There seems to be a need for black and white thinking, and a penchant for moralism: Someone has to be right and someone wrong in all matters.
These are not the instances in hill-wars, wich is basically what this was until the russians went in decisivly and with overwhelming force. This is not the instance in ASfghanistan either, as far as I can understand, where the different quwams may have different motivations and the hate of the neighbour and all who stand in the way of getting even with said neighbour most of the times far outshines the geopolitical, strategic and tactical considerations. The genius of men like Putin and Sarqawi is that they are able to shape these local hilbilly conflicts into a larger force, pushing and prodding here and there in order to get momentuum for their own larger strategic ideas. In this day of the internet, it seems that all too many are trying to fit events ibnto some over-riding storyline, some macro-narrative while in reality the world is made up of micronarratives who gradually become a macro-narrative seen through the lense of history. SOme few players have the skill to directly shape the micros into coherent policies, and some few commentators have the skill to both analyze the different sets of parameters inside the various micros and draw paralels while noting differences. The US seems to be sorely lacking in this respect, with a childlike need for straight lines and big enemies. Is it possible for a nation to get PTSD?
I understand your cynicism, but I think there’s been some important battling for truth in the blogosphere.
For me, this war has flushed out which blogs/pundits/news agencies are credible, and which are full of crap.
For example, there are several blogs upholding the Russian line about 2,000 dead in Tskhinvali, a number generated within 24 hours of Russian arrival and impossible to confirm. Many are justifying whatever Russia does now because 2,000 is about as many as were killed in 9/11. They (and Russian officials) decry anyone skeptical of that number as having suspect motives or being a Georgian sympathizer, or just being a liar.
Human Rights Watch and others today say the toll is less than 50, with dozens more wounded. Even the Russians are having problems producing the bodies on their TV channels, I saw a report yesterday that they have “100 soldiers” working on body counts. Whatever the real number is, it’s much less than 2,000.
They’re columnists. They’re paid writers on political subjects who churn out copy for money. What do you expect ?
I love that column about the Flying Tigers, by the way. It’s just such a perfect specimen of the soupy dreck you can get. Once you start sorting through a lot of the commentary, though, you’ll eventually get to something useful – that’s the beauty of the setup.
Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.
Where is Moynihan getting reliable information about Russian troop movements?
One thing this war revealed was that Saakashvili/Georgia has no funtional/reliable information network. It had to be kinda embarassing for them to report, early on, Russian troops in Gori when a Reuter’s reporter said (paraphrase) “I’m here in Gori, the Russians aren’t.”
JTapp, I agree. There are a couple of blogs I kind of enjoyed until this happened. Now I just don’t trust their judgment any more.
Affe, I L-O-V-E the comparison to Chiang Kai-shek’s China. I’m like, “oh yeah, we picked sides there, and remember how well it worked out?” This is what happens when people with a child’s understanding of history write about current events… like when Krauthammer compared Musharraf to Aquino. Who does that?
Josh, I think that’s an important point to make. While I’d chalk it up to Saakashvili’s crackdown on independent media after his electoral crisis last year, the point nevertheless remains: Georgian sources are not much more reliable than Russian sources. Though Civil.ge did an acceptable job, they were the exception.
For my own sake, this highlighted how weak my Russian skills are—I’m basically illiterate in the language, I’m finding, and had to rely on Nathan or other friends to help me translate what was going on in some of the web pages. This is disappointing, because I used to have no trouble at least recognizing words and then looking them up, but as time goes by without me living in a Russian-speaking country, these skills escape me. Plus, I’m learning Persian.
Oh well. The few places I could get a hold of Russian and Georgian blogs, especially over Livejournal, I found they had posted a rather incredible set of photographs, coverage, and personal accounts of what was going on. So in that sense the blogosphere still CAN be leveraged for incredibly in-depth coverage of conflict zones, even if the biggest blogs still only link to each other.
By the way, I do a pretty odd bit of Georgian history in my pocket.
There was a quriltai to elect a new Grand Khan in 1246 (after Ogadai’s widow Toragana died). The meeting was held near Karakorum.
Two Georgian princes attended, both wanting Mongol approval for the contested throne back home.
One was named David Narin. My last name is Narins. No assured connection.
All from Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes: a History of Central Asia.
If you count Georgia as part of Europe (I think the Georgians feel culturally European, but on the basis of flora and fauna the region is considered Asia) it has the oldest royal family in Europe, the Bagrationi. Apparently it originated in Armenia at the time of the Roman invasions and the Georgian branch began when the Armenian Bagratids fled to Georgia during an anti-Muslim revolt in the 8th century. Pyotr Bagration became a Russian national martyr after bloodying Napoleon’s army at Borodino. The USSR named its massive 1944 offensive that crushed the Wehrmacht “Operation Bagration”, so its interesting to see how tied in elements of Georgian and Russian history are-not that that’s at all surprising.
Complain all you want, but the blogosphere is first and foremost a place to challenge the traditional media, the politicians and their narratives. Patiently awaiting credible data before carrying out analyses is not an option when the aforementioned traditional media and politicans do not, but present the conflict in black and white, in spite of knowing no more than your average widely read blogger. You don’t seem to get that.
Klaus, my problem with the blogosphere’s coverage of this conflict is that most of it was parroting either traditional media or politicians’ narratives. There was precious little original analysis, or even actual critiquing (that is, born of knowledge and understanding, rather than reflexive reactions filtered through ideology). If all I need are knee-jerk reactions based on little more than assumption, I can read National Review. I don’t need a vast network of blogs to do that.
Which blogs exactly have you been following? The leftwing American “generalist” blogs I’ve read have done little but push back against the prevailing anti-Russian line in the US media, often far beyond reason. The rightwing blogs have done the opposite, but in the US blogosphere the left dominates.
If all I need are knee-jerk reactions based on little more than assumption, I can read National Review. I don’t need a vast network of blogs to do that.
It’s not about what you need or want, it’s about propaganda and counter-propaganda, fighting for media narratives. That’s the game, and it does not wait for verifiable facts.
I don’t exempt lefty blogs from criticism, but I also don’t read as many of them. The blogs I’ve been following for this are civilgeorgia.blogspot.com, globalvoicesonline, many livejournals when written in English (my Russian is not useful yet), and the few email dispatches I can get. Also, some foreign correspondents have produced exemplary work, notably at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, though Reuters and the BBC have also produced good work too.
My point here is to be VERY careful where you get your information from, to make sure it’s reliable, and not to trust generalists to comment insightfully on a conflict they cannot understand because they haven’t studied it. If a blog is just excerpting the New York Times, I see no reason not to just read the New York Times and get it right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, rather than having a few paragraphs filtered by someone else.
Ya know?
Absolutely. One can make the distinction between the careful and diligent writers – rather like academics – and the writers who want to dominate the newsfeed – like pundits – usually by doing round-ups and linking to whatever they want to be true. Like a news aggregator.
And while I’d go to the former for solid analysis, I don’t discount what the latter do, for the simple reason that the traditional media don’t hold back either, but also run with simplistic, skewed narratives. The run-up to the Iraq War is one such example, and its example is lodged deep in the minds of those who write for an US audience, so counter-propagandising is for many a bigger priority than informing. Deconstruction with a purpose, if you will.