Compressing History

One of the things that has long fascinated me in news coverage is the way that news stories which once covered every front page are eventually reduced to brief explanatory parentheticals through time. It's a necessary function because as you are writing current news, it is not practical to recover all the elements of a previous story, but in that compression, often critical context is lost, and very often, this compression ends up misrepresenting reality or propagating open falsehoods.

One example that's always bugged me is the claim that Saddam "threw the inspectors out" in 1998. What actually happened is that he limited their ability to look inside some of his "palaces" and government buildings as well as trcking their movements and sending warnings to the sites facing inspection so that they could rapidly clean up.

Saddam's concern, later proved correct, was that the weapons inspection teams were riddled with foreign spies trying to gather information seperate from the inspections. So, Saddam severely limited their access to some secure sites that were involved with defense outside WMD. Faced with this, the US forced a showdown that involved pulling out the inspectors before the missile attacks.

But see, that's way too long to include in every article about Saddam and Iraq, so the press seems to have settled instead on the shorthand version that "Saddam threw the inspectors out" even though it is plainly incorrect.

This little inaccuracies can be extremely important as they serve to alter history in the collective understanding, and, thus, these innacuracies can have an impact on future policies and actions.

The "Saddam threw the inspectors out" compression is just one rather egregious example of the "compression of history" that takes the form of journalistic shorthand when that period is discussed. There are obvious political reasons that version has been propagated. So, on to the current examples that caught my attention lately.

From the NYTimes yesterday: The poisonous blend of smuggling and sabotage is yet another blow to the economy of a country whose huge oil reserves were expected before the 2003 invasion to pay for its reconstruction.

Really? That was a widely held belief? To my memory only one person ever made that claim, Paul Wolfowitz, and he was one of the most hawkish towards war with Iraq. He was ridiculed at the time for the claim, and yet that "expectation" now covers us all? Or from the WaPo,

Symbolically, at least, the White House is eager to rebut the longstanding public impression of a president in a bunker listening only to like-minded advisers. Substantively, Bush has hardly signaled a major course change in the direction of his presidency, and skeptics recall past instances when nonconformists within the administration were shut out.

Skeptics recall? Colin Powell, Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman, just as a short list, were all widely reported in the pages of the WaPo as having been shut out.

These are very short term versions of this phenomena which is often most visibly present in the obituaries of major political figures. As example, I'll be very curious to read the Kissinger obituary.

It's through this selective compression that that the characterization of an individual or an event mutates through time. This compression is often the beginning stage in the formation of history.

And, it matters. Look at the history of Reagan that has been crafted, "tax cutter," "booming economy," defeated the Soviets. It is largely on this mythical description that the Republicans have claimed their position as the party better on the economy and better on defense. And that myth shifted the country's impression and led to the current Republican majority we see now. To give a sense of the depth of it, look how much incompetence, how many failures it has taken for the Bush administration to shake the grip of this myth.

The myth underlying the impression of the Republican party could just as easily be Nixon. And, going forward, it may well be Bush. That's why the "giver of freedom" tag is so important for the Republicans to attach to the Bush legacy. It will serve to justify the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan as the true horror of those wars slowly becomes reduced to a shorthand list of 2,475 killed and 18,000 wounded.

I don't know, I'm really starting to ramble. I hope you found something thought provoking in this. If not, sorry to waste your time. But, I do think that this is why all the blogs that do media criticism should be lauded, even if they're just chasing down little details. Because those little details can develop over time and alter current actions.

(This post is for Greyhair who took me to task once for minimizing media criticism which wasn't my intention. My point was that I didn't like to do media criticism because it never ends. But I do recognize it as vitally important.)