Stardate 20040410.1146

(On Screen): The term "fog of war" refers to the fact that it's never possible for anyone to truly know what's going on. That was true even when battles were relatively small and a commanding general could see the entire battlefield with his own eyes, and it's only gotten worse.

And if it's bad for the command hierarchy, it can only be worse for the civilian population back home in the era of satellite telecommunications. Time was when reports of a battle would appear in the newspaper days or weeks after it actually took place, because the report of the battle had to be carried on horseback or by ship.

The slow speed of communications could have more direct consequences. The Battle of New Orleans was the final battle of the War of 1812 between the UK and the newly independent United States. The American forces were commanded by Andrew Jackson, and the British attack was decisively repelled. That became a source of pride for Americans, and ultimately helped Jackson become President.

The Battle of New Orleans was actually fought after the US and UK had signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war. News of the treaty didn't reach that area in time.

Nowadays, information travels around the globe at the speed of light. We can watch video of events halfway around the globe in real time. But that doesn't mean that what we see is necessarily an accurate indication of the real situation. A telescope makes distant things look close, but it can still have warped lenses to distort what we see.

I didn't keep a link to it, but I saw recently an article where one of the people involved in peer-to-peer music sharing was claiming that something similar to that could eventually become a new form of news reporting which would replace the existing news networks. He had stars in his eyes and his head in the clouds, and didn't think about the fact that there are a lot of people out there who have a vested interest in promulgating lies.

You don't need "peer-to-peer" to do that. Some bloggers have become sources of news about events in their area, and there have been other attempts to use the web in that way. A notable example of that is the entire "Indymedia" effort, whose claimed goal is to provide a distribution channel for "the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth". Unfortunately, the experience so far is that they've been much more successful at the "radical" and "passionate" part than the "accurate" or "truth" part.

A hypothetical distributed peer-to-peer news distribution system would suffer from two major problems. First, the sheer volume of material would threaten to drown readers. Second, much of that material would be partially or totally false.

Not that the existing news services do much better. Supporters of the war have long complained of blatant bias in how many of the major news reporting agencies choose what to report and how they will report it. Sometimes they slip up and let us see information which exposes their distortion, and sometimes they don't. So that means we have to be careful in reading and responding to what they say, in the short term.

However, in the long term, that kind of thing can't be sustained. Blatant distortion of the news has a long and distinguished history, especially in nations where there is no freedom of the press.

In WWII in the Pacific, there was an initial phase of about six months when the Japanese seemed invincible and everything went their way. But after the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, that ended. For the next 15 months, the forces were more closely matched. The primary theaters of conflict were the Solomon islands and Papua-New-Guinea (PNG), and though there was a great deal of combat it seemed as if neither side could gain the upper hand. However, the clock was ticking and both sides knew it, because a large number of new ships were scheduled to begin coming off the blocks to join the USN in the autumn of 1943. Once that happened, things began to move much faster.

There was a major battle for the Mariana islands (Guam, Tinian, Saipan). MacArthur got to fulfill his promise to return to the Philippines. Okinawa was invaded.

And to read newspapers in Japan, each of those had been a major defeat for the US. Each time there were long lists of American ships, especially aircraft carriers and battleships, which had been sunk by the Japanese. (IIRC one American ship was reported to have been sunk eleven times, but in fact survived the war.)

But if one ignored the short term reports and paid attention to the long term trend, it was clear things were going very badly for Japan. The Japanese government claimed to have won nearly every major battle with the US, and claimed to have deeply wounded the US Navy each time, yet somehow the USN didn't act as if it was losing, and kept coming closer.

We've seen something of that same kind of thing in the news reporting from Iraq. Whenever there's bad news, we get headlines; when there's good news, it lands on the back pages. Last summer we got told there was huge discontent among Iraqis because unemployment was so high. But the "unemployment" story vanished from the radar screen – because it got corrected.

Of course, the general process over the last year hasn't been smooth; there have been advances and setbacks. Each time things got worse we got told; when they got better that wasn't news.

In a lot of cases the pro