The "din" of destruction

I just finished reading this article from the NY Times about an AP report (and the clamor that followed it) claiming that six Sunni worshipers were doused in kerosene and lit on fire by a group of Shiite attackers in Iraq.

I have to admit that for all my zealous pacifism, I've had trouble following many of the news details coming out of Iraq in the past few months. This quote from the article might explain why:

“And finally, as horrible as the alleged events in Hurriyah were, caches of dumped dead bodies are turning up in neighborhoods almost weekly, car bombs rip through markets and waiting lines and the death toll for American soldiers is approaching 3,000. No one is disputing those accounts.

But then, that may be partly the point. It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.

Part of the general political apathy in our generation stems, I think, from over-saturation. I used to think that referred only to the availability (or inevitability) of news information and sources, but I think that even within single publications the amount of coverage a single issue gets is enormous, and from day-to-day, very little changes.

I think this is why I've taken to long-form news magazines like New Yorker. They save the intermediary steps by collecting and analyzing the "facts" over an extended period of time (at least a week, often more), and as a result the articles identify problems, potential solutions, themes, debates, and "sides" of the issue or events at hand accordingly. But are they better?

One of the problems with long-form journalism, or any reporting that emphasizes the analytical over the immediate "factual" is that important elements that deserve attention are often dropped if they don't support the article's overall point. About two months ago, the New Yorker printed an article on the debate over string theory in contemporary physics. For weeks to follow, letters were printed in defense of string theory and its proponents, and identifying related-but-overlooked forms of physics sectarianism.

Another potential problem is, of course, bias. All journalism has bias, but in long-form journalism it's basically a necessity. Generally, I find long-form bias less disconcerting than short-form because it's marketed as "news analysis" and not just plain "news," so readers are at least informed that there's more to a New Yorker article than "the facts." There's no disguise. It becomes a problem for me, however, when I realize that I get all of some types of my news from left-wing long-form publications. The New Yorker has a "financial page" in most issues, and it's the only place I get any kind of financial news that isn't directly related to media/culture. But sometimes, as a leftist reading a notably leftist long-form publication, I start to wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice. It's not that I don't want to hear other views, it's just that I happened to read the financial page of the New Yorker once (with no prior interest in real-world economics) and I got hooked on its bite-sized-yet-long-form style.

To return to the issue of Iraq: the war itself is in a dangerous and precarious position, politically. At this point, the Iraq more seems more a symbol than a real-life event and it's used that way by all sides. John Kerry's idiotic joke seems an example of this--Kerry seemed to forget long enough to open his mouth that soldiers are people. The political right can be equally blind, by (among other things) insisting that it is the only reason many republican congressmen and women were voted out of office in the midterms.

The plethora of angry attacks and defenses of the AP report tells me the din is already there. It's not an issue of separating truth from fiction so much as separating ideology from reality. Will any more evidence to support or to refute the kerosene incident really affect how people think about it? One side will win. My guess is the other side will just ignore the after-effects.