By framersqool:
It's all well and good for many adventure tourists with press vests to go around ruined cityscapes bothering people who have lost everything, to ask them how they feel. But this is a far cry from covering a war by being an actual war correspondent.
This war has seen such negligent and ignorant coverage because there appear to be no actual war correspondents with the nerve or determination to accompany combat units at length. None of these people seems to have learned even the most basic tenets of tactics, strategy, weaponry, battlefield terminology, or military affairs in general. They report everything like one great big human interest story, tailored to what they must assume is an audience as fourth-grade ignorant and naive as the reporters are.
(Apologies to all those fourth-graders who almost certainly would have been doing the job better than we have seen. Though I agree that this is a job for grownups, when any such are available....)
And yes, to their credit, it is all very human and interesting, but it is not war reporting. It is civilian-tragedy reporting, and for what it is, some of it has been truly exemplary.
We are seeing the results of a campus-liberal-intelligentsia press corps assigned by history the honor and privilege of reporting on the most critical events in human history since the Cuban missile crisis. All they see is a big human interest story.
The military stuff, that's just so-oooo icky.
We're left with the retired generals and think-tankers who try and make sense of actual warfare—even if what they are given from colleagues in the field is so bereft of military information. The analysts are left with little more to offer than saying 'probably' a lot, along with various (albeit mostly well-founded) partisan opinions about all things Kremlin.
The most technologically-capable status of world news reporting in known history has met the biggest story of anyone's lifetime. These people have no idea how to report on it.
The press performance in the Ukraine invasion of 2022 should be remembered by history as the furthest the journalism trade has ever descended into narrative-pitching guesswork tacked together with endless editorializing based on hardly any facts.
Maybe, at long last, the profession will remember what its ONLY job is:
TO REPORT FACTS.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.