This is another post where I try to look rather closely at the way something is being said. Here, the topic is pretty serious - the communication of important data within the Pentagon - but that topic, while addressed, is not my main focus. Rather, it is the way that topic is reported that concerns me, and concerns me a lot. Obviously, my reasoning and conclusions are speculative, but I don't think they're entirely unfounded.

Those of us who have been enduring Elizabeth Bumiller's reporting for the New York Times over the course of far too many years have marveled at how someone so lazy, so incurious, and so biased could hold onto her job. I think I can offer a partial explanation. She's a messenger, not a reporter.

Still, rarely has her sloth been on such prominent display as it is here, an article about the Pentagon's dangerous obsession with elaborate PowerPoint presentations in lieu of serious analysis and genuine comprehension. But, appearances aside, this article wasn't written for you or me, instead... well... Go ahead. Read it. I'll wait.

Don't see what I'm talking about? Of course you don't. After all, you're not a reporter who's supposed to be doing an article on the problems with Powerpoint presentations, or who accidentally happens to know something very important about the subject. You're simply someone who relies upon the media to, you know, inform you. So it's quite understandable that you wouldn't realize that the problem with Bumiller's article is what is glaringly not mentioned. That omission would make this an appallingly bad piece of reporting... if Bumiller's intention was actually to inform the ordinary reader about the nature of the problem.

In fact, if you were a reporter, rather than a royal stenographer and self-appointed Messenger to the Mighty, and you were doing an article on problems with PowerPoint presentations in the military, you would be obligated to mention Edward Tufte's famous essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint which brilliantly described how thoroughly misleading and counterproductive these cheesy slideshows can be.

Who is Edward Tufte? Again, it's not your job, Ms/Mr Ordinary Reader, to know who he is. It should be a reporter's job to find out, however, but apparently Bumiller never did. Tufte is, barely arguably, the foremost authority on the visual presentation of complex data in the United States. Data like the stuff displayed in a military PowerPoint slideshow. Since the publication of his first masterpiece, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte has become well known as THE expert on how to create effective visual presentations, either in print form or live. Here's a link to an excerpt from his work, where he discusses the problems that were hidden in plain sight in a PowerPoint presentation during a space shuttle disaster, a presentation which gave NASA the misleading impression that the problem wasn't that serious.

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