Journalism has been famously defined as the first draft of history. But even a first draft requires some level of fact and thought gathering. What we got from Ft Hood yesterday wasn't even, on its face, journalism, because, on its face, it was raw and undigested, unfiltered information inflow.

Now, there might be some utility to getting facts unfiltered by any of the reflection and selection that could impose preconceptions on what we want to be able to use as an objective basis for our own higher-order interpretation. But just at the level of objective reality, before we start to theorize about relevance and significance, individual facts make any sense at all only if placed in some context and relation to other facts. If you don't wait to develope at least that minimum of fact structure before you dump the raw data on the public, you're just not practicing journalism anymore.

In fact, it's actually true that raw, unstructured data, in which factlets are ripped out of any context, actually encourages, even requires, biased interpretation. The viewer/readership is herded towards overinterpretation because it doesn't have enough of the fact structure to the reality being reported to prevent jumping to conclusions based on the pre-existing theories about the world that all of us carry around. Reality is rich enough to refute most stupidly simplistic theories with dispatch, but you have to present a rich enough version of objective facts to do that refutation, or you just create a vacuum in which the imposition of some or another fool theory about the events in question is necessary just to allow people to process what's being reported.

We're going to have to come up with some other definition for the sort of real-time "journalism" that doesn't allow for even the preliminary gathering of facts and thoughts that you need to do even a first draft. It's not journalism, it's not anything creditable, and, as Greenwald advises, it's to be simply avoided as an obviously illegitimate enterprise. I prefer to wait for the first draft.

It's really simple. We need to get universal health care to the people of Afghnistan, because doing so is an important part of the global war on terror. It will keep them from siding with the Taliban. But the people of the United States aren't at all likely to join the Taliban, so no health care for you guys.

Now, if you happen to be a US citizen, and you're unhappy about that prioritization, just do what every govt bureaucracy did in repsonse to 9/11 -- figure out a way to sell your funding needs as a GWOT priority! Join the Taliban! If the Taliban doesn't have a chapter in your neighborhood -- start one! Not only will your efforts help to get us universal health care -- you get to be the first kid on your block to wear one of those neat mullah turbans!