Kevin Dawes in Libya

Now, here’s someone who really deserves more traffic. Kevin Dawes, a “freelance battlefield journalist” from San Diego, reports from the middle of an artillery barrage east of Misrata, Libya, via his YouTube channel. Some of Dawes’s videos were uploaded as recently as two hours ago, but this was taken the day before yesterday:

This kind of micro-reporting won’t give you the war’s broader context — something that’s often inaccurately reported in any event — but following Dawes’s channel makes you feel almost as if you’re there. What impresses me most about Dawes isn’t just his physical courage, his obviously sincere sympathy for the people around him, or even the pathos in his humor, but the way he distinguishes himself from most other battlefield reporters by understanding enough about the weapons systems being fired around (and often, at) him to explain what’s actually going on.

When I read reporting from conflict zones, I find myself doubting the credibility of journalists who betray a complete technical and tactical ignorance of what they’re reporting. If you can’t see how this affects the quality of reporting from a conflict, just contrast the quality of Charles Hanley’s deceptive and inflammatory reporting from Iraq with dispatches like this, this, and this from Michael Yon. Among Yon’s many advantages over the likes of Hanley were a veteran’s understanding of his subject matter and an open mind. This isn’t to deny that Yon or Dawes are giving us their opinions with their reporting, only that they traffic in them openly, honestly, and factually.

In retrospect, whose reporting informed us better about what was going on in the ground on Iraq in 2007, as this country debated whether to abandon Iraq to terror and genocide? Contrasted with the work of most journalists in that place and time, Yon’s seems almost prescient. Who thinks that there would be anything for Dawes to cover in Libya now if we’d made a different decision in Iraq then?

Recently, many in the media have offered agonized confessions of how their industry misinformed us during the debate about invading Iraq in the first place. They did misinform us, out of a combination of laziness, ignorance, and groupthink. Had they done their job then, a majority of us might have opposed invading Iraq in 2003. Instead, a key link in our system of self-government failed us. It failed us again in 2007, when few of these journalists realized that they were already repeating the same error in Iraq for the same reasons. By 2007, they had become so obsessed with retrospective reporting about all they’d gotten wrong in 2003 that they lost touch with a new set of clear and present truths and consequences our country and our world then faced.

In war reporting, there is no substitute for knowing what you’re reporting about.