SDA's "The Baghdad Brigade" and an unabashed tribute...

I don't know how Kate McMillan, the heart and soul of Small Dead Animals does it. Really. Her blog has morphed over time, with a lot of hard work, and a core of devotees, to become one of the most significant media phenoms of the last few years. Persistent and incisive, she consistently displays an unequivocal ability to pull out the core of a story, and, more likely, the story of the story, and lay it bare for all to see and reflect upon.

Bolstered by a legion of fans who can also be sources, she consistently exposes the soft underbelly of an industry that has lost its way, capitulated its principles to a degree that is not only simply sad, but may even be wantonly criminal. Consistently she does this, all the while maintaining a professional career and still finding time to raise champion pooches, and show them throughout the US and Canada. A remarkable talent. A remarkable woman. A remarkable reporter.

Members of the MSM regularly decry and try to discredit bloggers as being simply "rumourmongers", "liars", or opinionated geeks with no real lives, even as they rush to make their own corporate "blogs", typically failing miserably in the process. They don't grasp the fundamental concept: a blog is not just the opinion of one, it is the interplay and exchange of dialogue by many, often disparate, individuals.

The core of the post must have an element of truth, however. It is easy to promote innuendo. Easy because much of what people learn from the MSM is based less on substance, and more on perception, spin, innuendo, allusion, outright fawning over personalities and ideologies. Many bloggers fall into the MSM trap - having an opinion is not enough. You must have a grasp of the issues as well. Not the MSM's perception of the issues, but a real sense of the real story - what it is, not what you want it to be.

Kate consistently gets that. And, more importantly, knows how to suppress an easy bias (without hindering her personality, I should add - it is a blog, after all), and more importantly still, knows that she ought to suppress it, in her presentations. Its not that she hides her politic, not at all. No one will miss that she holds right of centre views, and that most of her commentators follow that same bent. Its that those views are not the core of her reports and observations - the story is.

The Baghdad Brigade is a concise indictment of the failure of the MSM to honour themselves, let alone their constitutents. She writes:

...That brings me to something I've been noticing lately. The more generalized media auditing that is a primary focus of SDA has prompted a phenomenon of anonymous and defensive comments appearing here from members of the media who attribute misquotes and misrepresentation to their editors, headline writers, even to translaters.

That may all be true. But what is also true is that it doesn't matter who is responsible. Ignorance, bias, sloppiness, a reluctance to correct false reporting in as aggressive a fashion as it's first reported - is media malpractice.

Every person who knowingly participates in the release of a flawed product, whether they be the reporter who allows their information to be added to or altered, the editor who ignores a misleading headline, drive-by sneer or burying of the lede - down to the proofreader who realizes that context has being twisted or omitted - all are equally responsible.

Because I make part of my living as an automotive airbrush artist, I spend a good deal of time in automotive body repair shops. It takes a team to restore a damaged vehicle to its original soundness and safety. From the frame straightener to the windshield installer to the paint prep and application, modern automotive body repair is a concert of exacting trades.

Much of it is performed, day in and day out, by people who hold no university degrees. Some aren't even high school graduates. But, they know their jobs. As craftsmen, they know they will be held responsible for screwing up - but most of all, they understand that everyone who worked on that car shares the consequences when a vehicle is released that fails to meet safety or refinishing standards. Work must be redone. A pattern of faulty workmanship can result in a loss of insurance accreditation.

So, why is it that an industry that produces mere words and facts, that is stacked with university graduates, political celebrities and academics, which serves as a fundamental underpinning of our western democracy, does not hold their members to the standard of performance expected of a nameless welder in an auto repair shop?

How is it that reporters and editors can fail so profoundly, so routinely, with such utter internal unaccountability - and not lose their accreditation to issue a newspaper or news broadcast? ...

The stories about the media reporting from Baghdad and Afghanistan have become as profoundly important as the middle east stories themselves. An entire pillar of western civilization is showing deep cracks at the base on which it stands, cracks that threaten the integrity of the whole structure. It is bloggers like Kate who are the lay workmen scurrying around to rout out and fill the cracks and buttress the pillar. The MSM seems blithe to the tilt their structure is taking. To mix metaphors (badly, I admit it), they haven't yet got that the heat at their feet are the flames of burning Rome, not the cozy zephyrs of global warming...

Work through the links in Kate's post. Reflect upon the fact that you are reading about the media itself as it "reports" the conflict, not the tragedies of the conflict itself. Reflect on the fact that you are broadening your world perspective from the computer lens of a fairly humble commercial artist in small town Saskatchewan. Not just any small town commercial artist, mind you.

An extraordinary life, Kate. Thank you.