Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but I can't see how the left could ever wrest control of the media from the right.

I'm pessimistic in the short term myself, but I think that incremental progress can be made. I know for a fact that the Dems could get much better press if they had better media message management. The congressional Dem media people really, really suck. They don't return calls. They don't know how to craft an effective message that is usable to a reporter. A lot of reporters in DC, believe it or not, would use a message like that. But the media shops in Pelosi's and Reid's office have no idea how to get that done. So, their handwringing statements end up as a "critics say" instead of in the lede paragraph. That's just one example, and one I've heard from the horse's mouth.

TV journalism is harder to break. That's because the "reporters" are extremely vain, and are picked on the basis of looks, rather than ability. In addition, the exec producers, equivalent in function to editors in print, aren't journos but hucksters. They don't have a journalism background. But, one thing, a lot of the stuff that TV uses comes from print. So I think that's an avenue to pursue.

And I think that progress can be made in print. To do that, we have to have a much, much better understanding of the sausage-making process. You learn that by talking to the sausage makers, and listening to what they say instead of bashing them over the head whenever they reach out. And, some of them do.

My take, anyway.

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die

(The Doors could see the future)

I suppose where we both can agree is that what we call the "media" is a vast, and amorphous structure with no single goal or methodology. There are a lot of actors involved, from individual writers and reporters, to administrators, to editors and business managers etc., so there's always somewhere to get a hand hold (or lose one). Otherwise, we'd never hear about 80% of the stuff we discuss on these blog posts...

The short, shallow, opinionated and easily contestable (also, cynical) version:

The services compete over the course of roughly a decade, within very broad doctrinal grounds, over who will be the most important or lead agency in a range (from which they pick) of likely contingencies, most of which turn out to be way off. It doesn't matter how important their actual contribution is, if they are not lead agency, they do not control their own destinies and, so goes the thinking, are inevitably squandered, robbed of the chance to win wars, or saddled with the blame for losses. Their competition encompasses their budgets for weapons systems, training and doctrine, force structure, and so forth.

One or the other service is usually having an identity crisis, in any given decade. After WWII, the Army (to use an example) was having the blues (so to speak)because nukes, strategic bombers and so forth left its leaders wondering what good they would do in any imagined exchange with the Soviets. After a few decades and many shifts in doctrine (oh yeah, and a couple wars), it worked that out in the form of joint doctrine that saw the Army and Air Force joined at the hip. That 'AirLand Battle Doctrine' was what you saw in the first gulf war, and it worked reasonably well for a conventional doctrine.

From the Air Force's perspective, this doctrine placed an emphasis on their supporting (mobility + close air support) role, instead of their strategic (bombing) role, in which they are the lead agency. Arguments have been going on since the forties as to whether the USAF could ever win a war all on its own, without ground pounders involved.

Okay, all that you might have already known. Now, enter the post-gulf war shrinkage of the military, which starts in fall of 1991 and continues throughout the 90s. All the forces shrink; all are given some lattitude (within the context of first a 'bottom-up review', then 'quadrennial defense reviews') about how they will do this, so long as they can claim to be able to fight one major war or two major regional conflicts at the same time, and the whole package adds up to the target number (around $250 billion in 1990s dollars). Everybody wastes time letting go of their dreams. The USAF's choice, with every budget cycle, is to trade off force structure (bodies and units) for technology (platforms, etc). The assumption is that they will 'get well' in later budgets and that their weapons systems will put them back in the lead role.

Suffice to say, it didn't happen that way. The fashion of the day does not favor conventional tactical platforms or new strategic bombers, or even (much) the 'expeditionary' mobility platforms (they did get a new tanker funded, though). They even lost the battle about who would 'own' (be proponent for) Predators and other unmanned drones. This does not make for a happy air force. Mobility is not lead agency stuff; it's 'hauling trash'. Enter identity crisis. Enter advertising to the public. And, to bring this bedtime story full circle, enter Cyber Command.

I can't think of any good reason why this needs to concern the rest of us, really, in the short term. We don't need a new generation of warplanes, incremental upgrades and maintenance , fresh avionics and targeting systems, etc. should be enough. Not sexy, I know. But hey, Go Cyber Command!

Let the challenges begin. RMP?

In World War I, the medical community essentially told the miltary that their practice of moving soldier who had been exposed to Spanish Influenza around the country was going to result in millions of deaths.

World War I censorship and the jingoistic press at the time pretty much stifled any discussion of this, and the result was that millions of people, including millions of Americans, died unnecessarily.

What did the military learn from this? Well, clearly there was no remorse, no repercussions about having been directly responsible for killing millions of people, including millions of Americans. Instead, the military learned that its freedom to perform its mission as it wished to could be enhanced by control of the means of communication.

It really didn't take a lot of brains to know that the Iraq mission in 2003 had a vast potential for going off the rails. The Atlantic Monthly has provided evidence of exactly who was ignored and how right those who were ignored were. But those voices were stifled in the run-up to the war by the very set of attitudes and policies that Aaron Brown (whom I also generally have liked since his days at KING 5 in Seattle) still stands up for.

The result has been the deaths of millions of Iraqis and thousands of Americans, with Lord knows what else to come.