Well at the risk of offending , may I offer an alternative to your proposition that no one reads the milbloggers.

No one reads ANYTHING. Or wants to.

The general population is astoundingly STUPID and CLUELESS about anything not directly within their limited sphere of behavior. It reaches its intellectual summit by postulating on the likely winner of the latest American Idol, or watching video of Brittany Spears self-destructing. It doesn't watch the news. It doesn't read the news, and it doesn't wander around the Internet searching out the news. It simply does not care. Which frankly is all well and good. The problem is when its members still have fixed opinions about what is in the news about which they deliberately know absolutely nothing. If you watched the farce from the House of Representatives this week, you would have seen Members of Congress who were seemingly so clueless that they could have changed places with their chairs and the level of discourse would have been nothing if not improved. Imagine what their constituents must be like. And we think Iraqis are largely 'ignorant'. Pot meet kettle, so to speak.

But perhaps things are not quite so bleak as that. I myself was not going to watch Ms. Couric in Iraq simply because I never watch MSM output any longer. Been there --- done that. I don't trust it to accurately reflect 'objective' reality, and spinning objects tend to make me dizzy. But after the reviews came in from the first show I watched every video clip as streamed from the CBS website. So in effect I did 'watch' the show but the ratings would never reflect that fact. Maybe others did as well as those videos were always the most watched streams when I visited.

One can but hope I suppose as Ms. Couric did in fact do an excellent and FAIR job. I was impressed with her professionalism and the manner of her presentation. Surprised but impressed.

dougf: Concur. Go here for more: http://philippinesphil.blogspot.com/

Do an experiment. Interview her on FOX, and see what happens to the ratings.

Do an experiment. Interview her on FOX, and see what happens to the ratings.

Perhaps it is because the majority of her audience watches her because her news coverage "agrees" with what they think it should be, and that when she provides information that runs counter to their world view, then they tune out.

The MSM is in a death spiral and it's almost certainly too late for it to recover. In this specific case, the CBS news has horrible ratings because they have alienated so much of the country with their Left-wing bias. Any attempt to report fairly will not work because it is too little, too late to get back lost viewers who have long since found other sources of information. At the same time, the remaining loyal viewers will desert them if there is any move to balance out their coverage. I wonder at what point the big three networks will decide to abandon major news coverage altogether. The CBS News will be the first to go as it's fast approaching the five million viewer mark.

I have a few thoughts as to why this is so, but just thought I'd toss it out for open discussion first.

My guess about people not reading deployed milbloggers is just a guess, but I think it's got something to do with many not constantly pumping out content (for obvious reasons). Blog readers--and many/most bloggers--have incredibly short attention spans, and if there isn't anything posted for a few days they just move on to the next shiny object.

I also think it may be that most people simply cannot relate to the material, and they probably feel a little intimidated about commenting. I mean, most readers don't comment at any blog, but there might be some civilian-comfortably-at-home guilt going on, or a feeling of voyeurism, with people who visit deployed bloggers. Basically, I'm saying I think there's a little bit of a psychological hangup thing going on. Again, just a guess, but you know how people are.

One thing I'm sure of, though--if someone starts blogging while deployed (having not done so before), it does take a while for people to even know they exist if they don't make a point of keeping up on what new blogs are out there. I know I've found deployed milblogs quite a few times where I only learned of them *after* they'd already left the area and quit blogging. It's the same conundrum with regular blogs, only amplified due to redeployments and the subsequent shift in focus.

I didn't see the Katie Couric thing, but she's like nails on a chalkboard for me. I don't watch her EVER, not even for a laugh. I can get much better reporting from Iraq from milblogs, anyway.
;-) As far as her regular viewers go, though, it's probably a little of what The Brain said (they don't want their views challenged). But since most people are more preoccupied with trivial crap, I'm guessing most didn't want to deal with hearing about the war and bursting their bubble of blissful ignorance. I'm reminded of people like my mother, who's "tired of the war" and just doesn't want to hear about it any more. (I won't even bore you with how much THAT pisses me off!)

So Greyhawk, why do you think people tune out the news from the front, whether it comes from milbloggers or people like Katie Couric?