Whose revolution is it anyway?

It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window.

It is no criticism of our redoubtable corps of foreign correspondents to remark that once an arena goes (in the modern military jargon) ‘kinetic’, sociology goes out of the window. When there are battles to report, a correspondent’s instinct is to find the action and describe it. News is what good journalists do, first and foremost. In the claimed Arab Spring this year, therefore, the ebb and flow of conflict is at the centre of media reports.

And of course the ebb and flow of conflict matters, urgently. But (for me at least) the urgency becomes a problem. Once we put war reporting at the centre of news and commentary, it displaces inquiry into the psychology of the participants.