Assymetrical information  

Haven't been posting in a couple days, mainly because I've been in St. Louis, but also because since the war started I've had much less to say. I don't know why I expected the reverse to be true - I guess I underestimated the speed with which the war would develop, the speed with which my eyes would glaze over. For some reason I've read less and watched more; and I get the sense that others are doing the same.

Mickey Kaus had a post Friday (sorry, can't figure out the permalink) about the role of blogging in wartime where he sounded a lot like I did last week:

During war, for example, there's a tendency to buy the government's line for a few days - in part out of patriotism, in part in order to not offend sources, in part to not offend viewers and readers. Blogs can be a source of skeptical analysis - see item below - especially when the "facts" come so fast and furious they simply can't be analyzed fast enough (even without a pro-government bias) except by harnessing the distributed analytic power of the blogosphere! ... Bloggers can also speculate about information that reporters are constrained from disclosing for security reasons. (Since they're only bloggers, no enemy would believe them!) ... And there are some bloggers - "Salam Pax" being the most obvious example - who are simply in a position to know things others have a hard time finding out.

I think this is partly right - some bloggers have been able to provide some interesting analysis of the war, and others have done a terrific job of synthesizing the vast amount of information floating around out there (just how has The Agonist has become my most trusted news source?). But for the most part, all these reports are a conflicting mess, and that makes it hard to respond on any but the most basic factual level - probably the weakest level for bloggers, who like me tend to be sitting at their computers, chattering about events thousands of miles away.