Some time ago, a friend of mine who writes about the military told me that because so few reporters are interested in covering military issues, he sometimes has to turn down freelance assignments because there’s so much work to go around, and too few people to do it.
I thought of this when I read William Arkin, the Washington Post‘s military and national security blogger today. Arkin laments that military reporting isn’t more like sports reporting, where the reading public doesn’t treat reporters like the enemy, but instead like someone who has an equal obsession with the topic.
In sports, he says, “professional reporters are hardly the enemy,” and their readers “depend on the news media for commentary and amplification and insight; they study and memorize the statistics.”
He continues, “I’ve often thought if we could cover the military like sports, with transparency and intimate knowledge and a play-by-play that was both affectionate and unsparingly critical, we’d have a healthier debate. Interest and knowledge on the part of the typical American in foreign affairs and national security would actually increase.”
Don’t get me started on the often shoddy work of ESPN’s hockey analysts, but Arkin does have a point about sports writing. The best military reporters are people who either have a military background or have spent years inside the system, and therefore have a deep understanding of what makes the Pentagon–and its often outsize personalities–tick. But rare is it that you will see their work lauded by the milblogging community, or by other commenters who parachute into the world of military reporting. Part of the problem, no doubt, is the deadening prose style inflicted on reporters by their editors, and the obsessive need for “balance” in contemporary American journalism; two weights that are lifted in the sports pages. Sports writers are usually spared the heavy editorial pen, and are allowed the freedom to be creative and have some fun with their reporting. This isn’t to say that military reporters can write like their colleagues over at the sports desk, but anyone who has spent any amount of time around folks in the military know that there’s no shortage of smart, funny, and interesting people in their ranks that could easily fill column inches with their insights.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.