People spend a lot of time talking about things they don't know much about

So 92,000 documents were posted on Wikileaks relating to the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan. If one person can screen 100 documents a day (12 1/2 per hour for 8 hours), it would take 920 person days to do an initial screening of the corpus of documents. Of course, one could use electronic screening to search for specific names or terms much faster, but to figure out what the body of documents means requires a lot more than that.

Thus 31 people could do an initial screening of the 92,000 documents in 30 days. Figuring a 25 day working month, it would take 37 people. I wonder whether the New York Times, the Guardian, or Der Spiegel devoted that kind of manpower to doing the initial screening of the corpus of documents.

How long would it take to do a serious analysis of the documents to ascribe a reasonable measure to their credibility, and to derive the important implications if one were starting from an initially screened corpus of 92,000 documents? I would think that this would be better done by a small team working over a longer period of time. I would guess months at a very minimum would be required to do this well.

So how come we are hearing so many "talking heads" expounding on what the body of documents says and means? Some of course are spokespersons for the affected government or their military forces, who have both the advantage of having seen these documents in the past and formed organizational views of their import as well as having huge staffs to put to work on the documents. Still these official spokespersons are likely to be spinning the news as seems most advantageous to their organizations, and this is a much easier task than the real analysis of the documents.

The rest of the talking heads should be ashamed of themselves, as should the news agencies that put them forward.