11–20 of 43 posts
The Vice documentary 'This Is What Winning Looks Like' has some great reporting on Afghanistan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
A reddit discussion on looking at the documentary critically.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/25vm20/this_i...
Tl;dr 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.
Tl;dr 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.
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 t…
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…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
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 t…
And so we have to rely on our traitors and prisoners to do the work for us. I applaud you, Chelsea!
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,…
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.
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 t…
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.
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.