It's part of what I suppose we could call "template journalism" - a big disaster is always followed by an "analysis" article on what went wrong and what should be done to fix it to prevent or ameliorate future disasters.

What's troubling is how in our current age of nonstop cable news and Internet coverage, plus the incessant chatter of blogs, the speed at which these cycles move is increasing. It's increasing to the point that we're second-guessing disaster response while it's still happening.

And so even as firefighters continued to fight the deadly and destructive blazes that have caused so much damage in San Diego County, even as tens of thousands of area residents had yet to return to their homes last week, on Oct. 25 an Associated Press story by Aaron C. Davis and Michael R. Blood criticized the supposed delays in getting firefighting aircraft to the fires. (A slightly shortened version of the article ran Friday in the North County Times on Page A-3, and the full article is archived on our Web site at tinyurl.com/2klctl.)

The entire supposition of this article is that there had been a failure. This seemed more than a little premature, given that the article itself dismissed out of hand state rules that required a fire spotter on any firefighting helicopters, which Davis and Blood blamed for the supposed delays. But their analysis completely failed to explore the role and importance of the spotters, never informing us readers of what the spotter does, why the state has required them, or what the risks might be in waiving such a rule.

Instead, the spotter rule was simplistically portrayed as a roadblock to efficient firefighting.

And the people used to buttress the assumption that the aircraft should have been airborne sooner - despite fire officials saying the conditions were too dangerous for the planes to be in the air the first couple of days of the fires - were not firefighters, or aviators. They were politicians: Brian Bilbray. Elton Gallegy. Dana Rohrabacher.

It's fair to ask what possible expertise three members of Congress could possibly have in either firefighting or aviation. The article never cited any particular expertise on their part.

Perhaps if the AP (a nonprofit cooperative jointly owned by its many member news affiliates, including the North County Times) had waited a while longer to analyze this story, been a bit more patient, a fuller, more complete and thus more informative article would have emerged. A bit of time, an allowing of the passions of the moment to cool, is generally considered necessary for an effective analysis of any issue. Rushing to judgment is neither sound public policy nor good journalism.

When the fires are finally out, there will be time for those who are trained in fighting fires to sit down and analyze what might have gone wrong - and it's important that we're there to report back to you on what they find, as well as to run those results by other folks with comparable expertise to see if what they report seems reasonable.

But the time for that is after the fires are out and the real experts are no longer busy fighting those fires.

- Contact columnist Jim Trageser at (760) 631-6628 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.