I have a friend who spent this last summer completely tuned out from everything and anything mainstream media-related. It was an inadvertent tuning-out, brought on by the circumstances of his job at the time, but this friend is someone who has been tuned in to the happenings in and about Iraq since the U.S. “shocked” and “awed” that country back in March 2003.

So, to hear that he had spent multiple months under some weird, quasi-forced abstinence from all things news, I wondered if he felt like he had missed out on crucial events, now that there was a significant knowledge gap about the war that he would have to scramble to fill. His answer surprised me a bit.

He talked about how his previous mainstream routine kept up with every Sadr City showdown, every road-side bomb, and made each successive day’s events seem unique and invaluable to understanding the trajectory of the war. When his sole information source was the mainstream media, things perpetually sounded sensational and groundbreaking, but that was the extent of the coverage; there was no real analysis, just lots of “shock and awe.” This discovery was frustrating, to say the least.

But this kind of lament is nothing new. When the U.S. military offered to embed reporters within battalions during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, there was an outcry from within as well as outside of media organizations about how this was going to lead to biased and/or censored reporting. And yet, the set-up prevailed. It was even adopted for this Gulf War.

True, embedded reporting is dangerously first-hand, but it makes for a made-for-TV war viewing experience that feels hollow. It’s not that news from embedded reporters is necessarily bad or faulty, it’s that this trend has spawned a new form of journalism-the non-investigative kind, where all information is handed to you, and the sheer volume of it makes it impossible to ignore. The majority of war news coverage has become a never-ending series of press conferences combined with footage from “the field,”- a.k.a. a hotel room balcony. With this in mind, I see how my friend came to the conclusion that rehashing is not the same as analyzing.

So, to gain real insight on what path the Gulf War II is headed down, a lot of people are turning to blogs. Specifically, those written by military men and women, which have come to be known as “milblogs.”

As with most personal blogs, these contain a mish-mash of topics: entries on how much a soldier misses his family are interspersed with stories on the struggles of the local population, and detailed accounts of medical emergencies and attacks. There are eulogies for dead fellow soldiers, photographs of combat gear, and hang out time in the Humvee; recipes; frustrations are aired; patriotism is espoused. It’s not your traditional newscast, but that’s a good thing.

More and more people are looking for alternative sources of information/reporting these days (eg; The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), and milblogs are receiving more and more hits as the war drags on. These soldiers’ “reports” are more compelling and urgent than any sound bite you’ll hear on CNN, and they’re difficult to tune out, for fear of missing some crucial event, and having to fill a knowledge gap-you are, after all, keeping tabs on a fellow human whose life (at times) hangs in the balance.

And, as long as people keep tuning in, hope for change remains on the table, both for the state of journalism, and for Iraq.