A question of priorities

Monday, March 09, 2009

A question of priorities

You can sometimes have sympathy with journalists in the MSM. Faced with the pressure of responding to daily events, and keeping pages and airtime filled, there is very little time to carry out really intensive work that gets to the bottom of an issue.

Thus, we get a really important paper, published today by the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House, in its journal International Affairs. All it gets a few quick lines in The Daily Telegraph. Expressed in lurid, populist tones, this does not get near doing the paper justice. In fact, in going for the "headline appeal", it completely misses the main points of the paper.

Therein lies a problem for this blog. We too have the pressure of keeping the posts flowing, the frequency of which has a direct influence on the level of our readership – the more we post, the more readers we get. If we really took the time out to analyse in depth some of the issues, our postings would fall off, and our readership numbers would decay. We would be doing good work, but no one would be reading it.

However, this paper is important. It asserts that "Britain's defence is in a state of crisis." For all that we are in a state of crisis with the economy, Britain's defence is important – and will become even more so as economic instability feeds its way into political instability, and thence to conflict. It is vitally important that we get the decisions right, and prepare as best we can for the future.

Thus, I am going to take the time out thoroughly to study the paper and write a review, which I hope to publish this evening some time which is now published on Defence of the Realm.

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