Practicalmadness

CNN.com reports tonight that a surprising number of people -- either journalists, armchair generals or honest-to-god U.S. troops -- are blogging about the war even as they are out there fighting it.

LT SMASH has the distinction of being both (a) written by an American GI fighting as part of Operation Iraqi Takeover and (b) named after a less-than-flattering Simpsons reference. The upshot of this is that yes, Virginia, the Army watches The Simpsons too.

Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing eschews both hard-hitting dispatches from the front and informed commentary on the progress of the war for what appears to be a facile catalog of Wired News articles and Bad Things The Lefties Are Doing To Our Troops Back Home. In other words, a blog.

Blogs of War is by far the slickest of these sites, begging for cash through both a PayPal donation box and by selling stuff through CafePress. It's also one of the more comprehensive and open-minded sites, although the authors' pro-war slant informs it all. They've even taken time off to post some reports about Canada's SARS (superflu to you) outbreak, news which does indeed concern anyone who lives in North America, has been getting their news exclusively from the Fox War Channel and has a vested interest in not dying a horrible, painful death.

Meanwhile, today's Red Streak (if you don't know what this is, go thank God you don't live in Chicago. No, do it now.) is running a typically truncated report on which media sources have traded objectivity for access. Fox News seems to be the biggest offender, often peppering their hard-hitting, honest coverage with phrases like "we", "our troops" and "the enemy".

(As if that waving American flag in the upper left of the screen didn't leave a big enough hint.)

TIME Magazine's Big Spring War Issue is also getting in on the act, laying bare the compromises the networks' "embedded" journalists are making in order to be travelling with the coalition forces in Iraq.

The international consensus is clear: if you want objectivity, watch/read the BBC. France and Germany, however, have threatened to veto any resolution agreeing that the BBC is the only outlet covering the war objectively, and instead want coverage where reporters sit in the studio and talk about the war in broad, hypothetical terms.

Oh, and speaking of not-with-a-bang, but-with-a-whimper...