Is it any surprise that newspaper war stories are usually one-sided and glib, considering they are written by journalists who:
a. have "established relations with the military",
b. are rated by military contractors as likely to produce "favourable" coverage
c. are subject to revocation of access AND blacklisting for "controversial reporting"
A system that is designed to promote the army's point of view and penalize those that deviate from it will end up producing exactly that.
The problem, and the solution, lies in the rules of embedding:
> A Pentagon spokesman said, “Embeds are a privilege, not a right.”
> If a reporter’s embed status is terminated, typically she or he is blacklisted. This program of limiting press access was challenged in court in 2013 by a freelance reporter, Wayne Anderson, who claimed to have followed his agreement but to have been terminated after publishing adverse reports about the conflict in Afghanistan. The ruling on his case upheld the military’s position that there was no constitutionally protected right to be an embedded journalist.
As long as embeds are considered a "privilege" to be doled out (or rescinded) by the army based on it's own publicity objectives, it's impossible to expect neutral journalism from such a system.
If you're "embedded" you're a guest; not only is it bad manners to bite the hand that feeds you, it's also fundamentally against human nature. Embedded journalists will almost always side with who they're embedded within.
Independent journalism can only be produced by truly independent journalists: journalists who don't depend on the people they're reporting on for their very survival.
Is this possible? Maybe, but we sure haven't seen much of it.
Hoping that traditional embedding will produce true journalism is wishful thinking.
Or maybe the other side should offer to embed western journalists within them; that could prove to be fascinating. As a reader, I would be very interested in what the so-called "bad guys" think, what their motivations are, what goals they're pursuing, how they're fighting, etc.
I read that far more as a problem with journalism than a problem with the military. None of those points in any way limit the freedom of the press to report neutrally, or in any other way they want, on a war. Even if being an embedded reporter might not be a constitutionally protected right and might be subjected to military control, that's not the only way the media can report on a war. It's just the easiest way, and modern journalism seems to like the easiest approach to everything.
The concept of press freedom doesn't necessarily seem to include an implied obligation that the government must help them do their jobs.
Can you imagine that complaint being used for anything else that journalists report on?
"Reporting the activities of drug cartels ends up favoring the cartels because they only accept journalists who tell their side of the story."
"We were going to do a big expose on medical malpractice in Regional Hospital, but the administration refused our request for a month-long officially sanctioned observer mission within the hospital so we couldn't."
"It's no wonder that news reports always praise the police, since your ride-along privileges get terminated right away if you don't play along."
Yeah, reporting from a war zone is dangerous and difficult and getting help from the military makes it a lot easier. But that's their job.
I think a better way of expressing the issue is that, as long as the US Military considers itself a State unto itself, we have a problem. In fact it is the military who have a _privilege_, not a right, to play with their toys and keep their secrets, which can and shall be taken from them by The People who are granting that privilege. Any time a military officer attempts to apply military policies/logic to his civilian masters, you've got someone who needs to be removed from that post immediately. Alas, there are few politicians capable of doing that, these days.
And so we have to rely on our traitors and prisoners to do the work for us. I applaud you, Chelsea!
From my very limited understanding of embeds, it appears that they are journalists who form part of the army team. It is not clear to me if they are protected/have access to military secrets by virtue of being part of the team; however, it appears to be implied. In such a scenario, I am not sure how the question of neutrality even ever appears. If you are embedded, you are by definition not neutral? Surely, there are other means for war journalism to exist? As was the case during the other wars of the past century?
18 year olds don't fly Apaches. It takes 2-3 years at a minimum, after enlistment, before all the required schools are completed before someone is qualified in an AH-64. In the case of most officer pilots, tack on another couple of years for commissioning.
The risk goes up if you're hanging out with a group of armed insurgents heading towards US infantry wearing no clothing to distinguish you as a noncom before crouching behind cover to aim a shoulder mounted lens at an Apache that was just subjected to RPG fire.
Maybe the silent downvote was for the snark. I was trying to follow the tone of parent, but this is probably too serious an issue to joke around on. My apologies.
I get frustrated, though, that so many still take the WL narrative of events at face value, even though WL edited the video and omitted relevant facts, ultimately distorting the entire nature of the incident.
First, WL marked up the video to highlight non-weapons, suggesting by omission that there weren't weapons in the video, even though there were. Then, they omitted facts like how the Apache crew had avoided engaging insurgents earlier that day, because they suspected noncoms were present, and were going out of their way to avoid civilian casualties.
I find it especially frustrating that supporters of a group that promotes the open discussion of information will just suppress, through silent downvotes, anyone with a different perspective on events, even if that perspective is based on facts they should know if they had only read the source they originally cited.
For the record, revelation, I didn't even downvote you, I just added my take. Even though we disagree, I don't think hive minds and one-sided discussions are ever beneficial for a site like this.
I don't think journalism outside of warzones is good enough to convince me that lack of access is the problem.
We have rapid access to more information today about daily violence around the world, be it in Syria or Iraq or Nigeria or North Korea,* than under any other era of information technology.
The problem isn't distribution of information. The problem is that people can't be bothered.
* NK is probably the best example of problems with access to information, their regime keeps a very tight lid on things. Even so, we still all know the country is undergoing systematic repression, forced labor, starvation as a method of controlling the people, along with brutal gulags where torture, rape, and death are your most likely short term outcomes. Look at the "news" stands though. People are only interested in celebrities. They're most likely to associate NK with Dennis Rodman over anything else.
I was the public affairs chief for Regimental Combat Team 6 (USMC), with a "territory" covering half of Al Anbar Province including Fallujah & Ramadi in 2007. I met scores of journalists and had high level visibility into the Marines' handling of journalists in Iraq.
The first thing I want to say is that Manning is describing the Army's approach to journalism coverage. It is quite different from the Marines' approach, which as far as I could tell (and from my vantage point I was in a good position to have a clear understanding) was extremely open. I do not recall any cases of "blacklisting" or otherwise limiting access of journalists to events, leaders or units in our area of operations (AO). I did hear stories about how the Army was handling it and it was, in typical Army fashion, being handled very poorly. I realize this might sound like glib "Semper Fi" jingoism but you'll have to trust me there was a real difference. (BTW the Marine Corps isn't guiltless, I'm sure, but during my time I was pretty proud of our commitment to openness.)
Second, about the tally of reporters. In 2010 the coverage had wound almost completely down because frankly the American people had lost interest. Even in 2007 the number of embed requests we received declined when "peace broke out" during the Anbar "awakening". There's no reason to think that the reason the official count of embeds never rose above 12 (if that's true) because of official limitations. Instead I think it's pretty reasonable to think that is because most embeds would have been quite boring at the time, relatively speaking. It was much easier to sit inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and report from there.
I don't really have a punchy conclusion to put here. Basically, don't believe everything is black or white in this matter. Like everything it was/is a complicated system with a lot of moving parts, and to clump it all into some homogenous bucket is basically give up on actually understanding.
The problem extends much further than Iraq and affects all journalism. For example, the most widely read report from the New York Times on the Russia-Ukraine conflict was completely false. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-york-times-propaganda-photo...)
That being said, the NYT is still much more neutral in its reporting than the kremlin-funded Russia Today, which is little more than a propaganda machine, including it's US arm.
I've spent the last few years trying to create a Wikipedia-like system where anyone can curate and fact-check the first hand sources coming out of an event. There is incredible content coming from the people on the ground who, despite having their own opinions, are not blatantly funded by someone who is trying to twist the story to meet their narrative. It seems to be working well so far with hardcore news junkies using it (the group similar to the Wikipedia editors), but we'll have to see in a couple days at the public launch.
Your point lacks credibility because the one link you cite is nothing but a Kremlin mouthpiece. Ie it's painfully blatant & appears to be written by RT staffers.
I hope Americans can elect a president that will pardon Manning and Snowden in day one of presidency. If a presidential candidate can at least promise to do that, then we'd have a pretty good sense that he or she is going to be a pretty good president regarding government transparency, media freedom, basic rights, and so on.
At the very least the question of pardoning them should be asked in a live televised debate, to see how the candidates stand. If none of them are willing to commit to that, then there's a very high chance US will continue on the dark path is currently on.
Even if said President wanted to do it, I doubt that the military-industrial complex would let him/her. They would burn a lot of political bridges, and possibly end up unable to accomplish anything else of significance during their Presidency.
The American mainstream media is severely dysfunctional. Cable "news" networks are biased outlets for each political party to deliver their message. Even more-traditional network news outlets like NBC News have sacrificed the appearance of a separation of the reporters from the politicians they're supposed to report on by hiring family members of recent and current political figures. On NBC's current payroll are Jenna Bush Hager, and Chelsea Clinton. On CNN's payroll is Chris Cuomo - brother to the Governor of New York.
It seems that above all else, mainstream news craves access. Hiring the presidential daughters provides a network like NBC access to those presidential families in a way other networks may not have. Attending the annual White House Correspondents dinner provides reporters access to celebrities and a night out of dining and drinking with the people they're supposed to hold to account for their actions. And being complicit with the military's approach towards how a war should be reported ensures they retain their access to the war "story" - be it factual or massaged.
Real reporting is hard. And when media organizations elect to go along with how a story is presented rather than providing raw, unbiased accounts of things, it does an injustice to the public. And it's made even more difficult when an administration chooses to take an aggressive stance towards journalists regarding how they source and report their stories.
It's never been easier to be a reporter and disseminate information to millions. I can only hope that the public seizes that opportunity and fixes the ways that news is currently broken.
I believe pbiggar of CircleCI might comment on that - his (failed) YC from a few years back was a "new news" take. Apparently it is far from clear what is going to come next - technology has provided the opportunity but not the solutions
There was a panel at a summit in Colorado where someone was talking about their plans for fact based journalism on a new Al Jazeera America, and someone from MSNBC or one of the other cable networks was there.
It was a really wrenching exchange as the existing cable mogul defended the status quo, saying something like, "We'd love to have sophisticated news consumers tune in, but those people have complex lives and interests, they don't watch news every night, they just read it quickly online then go to things like the ballet. We run the market experiment with sober, deep, fact-based news every night against PBS. It doesn't win."
It's helpful to realize that even when Fox is top of the ratings, the viewers it has as a percentage of the American population are exceedingly tiny.
Iraq never had more than 12 embedded journalists covering 100,000 troops, and they had to be nice or get removed.
Democracy needs transparency and journalism is one of the best means of ensuring this - and it was totally strangled in Iraq so that abuses by Pro-US Iraq groups got no criticism in US - and this leads to no criticism of our military and administration. This fails to be healthy.
Since I seem to be the only one awake I will comment on Chelsea's op-ed. She raises the really important point of journalists needing to be able to be able to report on what is actually going on for the American public to be able to make an informed decision. What I wonder is how we (by we I mean the greater tech community) can do to make this happen?
This is the question I hoped would bubble out of this post (as opposed to the question 'why are we seeing politics on HN'). Part of the answer would be to build tools such as SecureDrop/ StrongBox:
But that only makes communications and authenticity possible. Access -- as in embedding problem Manning describes -- and censorship or selection bias will still be a problem. Those seem more like policy issues than technology problems. Along those lines, possibly Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com/) and of course, supporting the EFF (https://www.eff.org/).
Those are my thoughts, but I second your question and hope others have input.
"The documentary follows U.S. Marines as they train Afghan security forces, showing their ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption as well as the reduced role of US Marines due to the troop withdrawal."
A reddit discussion on looking at the documentary critically.
The same can be said about 99% of journalism about government at every level, including local government and policing. There is much too little skepticism.
This is why citizen journalism, as rough as it often is, is successful, and why data-based journalism like fiverthirtyeight is the future of professional journalism.
Rather easy to take potshots, now that Iraq is falling apart. If this outcome was so obvious why wait until now to write an op-ed?
The pre-war coverage had some problems but I thought the reporting about the war, on the whole, was pretty decent. I read a lot about torture and about the lack of press freedom in Iraq.
> Rather easy to take potshots, now that Iraq is falling apart. If this outcome was so obvious why wait until now to write an op-ed?
It's outcome was known and obvious from the get go. You kill the dictator that repress another extremist. What did you think it was going to happen? No retaliation.
America's 'Wars' from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, War on Terror (and War on Drugs) have all been, very, very, very bad. I can't think of a military campaign that accomplished their goals, unless said goals were to cause as much shit as possible and get paid shit ton for doing so.
There were many analytic saying it will end like this (I don't have links at the moment).
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Dethroning Saddam just led to a power vacuum that installed whatever he was suppressing for the duration of his reign.
Like, are you questioning why Manning waited until now to publish an op-ed? I'd wager it's because Manning was going through the whole trial -> prison -> acclimating to prison thing.
a. have "established relations with the military",
b. are rated by military contractors as likely to produce "favourable" coverage
c. are subject to revocation of access AND blacklisting for "controversial reporting"
A system that is designed to promote the army's point of view and penalize those that deviate from it will end up producing exactly that.
The problem, and the solution, lies in the rules of embedding:
> A Pentagon spokesman said, “Embeds are a privilege, not a right.”
> If a reporter’s embed status is terminated, typically she or he is blacklisted. This program of limiting press access was challenged in court in 2013 by a freelance reporter, Wayne Anderson, who claimed to have followed his agreement but to have been terminated after publishing adverse reports about the conflict in Afghanistan. The ruling on his case upheld the military’s position that there was no constitutionally protected right to be an embedded journalist.
As long as embeds are considered a "privilege" to be doled out (or rescinded) by the army based on it's own publicity objectives, it's impossible to expect neutral journalism from such a system.