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US Military Launches YouTube Channel
Jenga717 writes "The US military has launched its own channel on YouTube, in efforts to shift the media's focus of Iraq from a negative to a more positive light, and to 'counter the messages of anti-American sites.' From the article: 'The footage is not picked specifically to show the military in a good light ... and is only edited for reasons of time or content too graphic to be shown on YouTube ... And while all the clips currently posted have been shot by the military's combat cameramen, soldiers and marines have been invited to submit their own clips.' The question is, where are they supposed to submit them? Starting 'on or about 14 May 2007', the Department of Defense will block troop access to Myspace, Youtube, MTV, and more sites, due to a 'growing concern for our unclassified DoD Internet, known as the NIPRNET'." More commentary below.
The troops will be unable to access these sites from any computer on the DoD network, yet are still able to access them from their home computers — which they can't use on the DoD network. So why the censorship? The DoD cites security reasons, but the Commander of Global Network Operations (DoD's Joint Task Force)"has noted a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites." The PDF released by the DoD reminds troops that this "benefits not only you, your fellow Servicemembers, and Civilian employees, but preserves our vital networks for conducting official DoD business in peace and war." Sounds like quite a sticky situation."
Isn't that called "propaganda"?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Here is a nice video from the good american army educating the Iraqi population?
Is that the kind of classified information we should not allow the marines to post?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6c4_1176720508&p=1
John Vai
Oh really? So what is the criteria then? number of shots on target? cost to the taxpayer of munitions expended? rounds discharged per second?
Entertainment value?
I mean, c'mon, that's just such a silly statement. What other reason can the military ever have for releasing any media at all beyond terse official communiques?
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
Propaganda is a funny word with a million connotations. Sure, this could be called propaganda, as could much of the reporting coming out of Iraq from various outlets.
Wars are hard to cover, and the mish-mash conflict/counter-insurgency that is Iraq is no exception. The problems are similar to those of any other big, contentious political conflict, such as elections, only now people are shooting each other, a reporter's access is often limited to a certain area and frequently only to one side, and the emotions run about 100 times stronger.
I like the use of the word "propaganda" in Spanish better, as a word used to describe any advertisement as well as its perhaps less savory meanings. Propaganda tries to influence people, yes, but it can play a role in informing people. A car ad, for example, informs me about say the gas mileage of a car and attempts to convince me to buy the car at the same time. The information regarding gas mileage is accurate and factual, but it is not simply handed to me straight - it's done in a persuasive manner.
News "reporting" has become more of the same, as the 24 hour networks seem to have a system where supposedly unbiased reports - and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're all biased - are viewed, and then commentary from a pundit whose main qualification is having an opinion is solicited, and this commentary runs just as long if not longer than the report itself. I for one am tired of hearing Jack Cafferty, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs (I particularly dislike Dobbs, but that's another post), Hannity and Colmes blabber on.
The problems are not simply ones of bias - it's a lack of depth, and this problem exists on the supply and demand sides as well. American news outlets have consistently cut back on international news for well over a decade now, and other than a few select cities worldwide most simply don't have correspondents overseas. The results of this problem could easily be seen in the recent Israeli-Lebanese (well, whoever exactly the other party was - it was pretty nebulous) conflict last summer. The major wire services, news outlets, etc. simply didn't have many reporters in Beirut to keep track of things. They flew out their usual talking heads and depended on the information of local stringers, who often have their own agendas and biases built in. A textbook example of this would be the Adnan Hajj photography controversy - a local stringer who doctored photos and used misleading captions to get his point across.
Keeping reporters overseas is expensive, and combat embeds - the safest method of transportation for journalists in Iraq - isn't exactly cheap, either. If you notice, television coverage in the U.S. is often interspersed with clips of combat and other footage from the Iraq conflict recorded during the invasion over four years ago. Or from the latest 12 - 24 hour embed a reporter did with a unit, which is hardly sufficient time to get to know things. Troops also hate these short embeds, something I say from personal experience not as a soldier but from long discussions I had with a French friend talking about his military experience in Afghanistan as a unit commander. Reporters often kept his group from getting the job done. After putting up with a few embeds, he told all those who followed that if fighting occurred they were on their own - and he sure hoped they brought weapons and ammunition.
But there's another reason for this lack of depth of coverage: Americans don't really care about what's going on in the world. Fewer than 20% of Americans have a passport at any given time, and I'd wager that 4 years into a massive troop deployment in Iraq more than 50% of the public still couldn't find the place on a map or identify its capital city. Americans tend to have strong moral feelings about war in general, good and bad, but few and far between are those actually informed. This apathy combined with the extremely
Here, let me help you out a little. I happen to know the guys from the apache farmer video. Think about it for a second, it's night....late at night. How many people do you know work on farm equipment in the dark late at night? Also when we went out there after all of this you know what we found? Oh, wow missiles and rockets, the only reason that they didn't shoot at the Apache is that they didn't know where it was. When you can't tell the enemy from the guys that aren't the enemy bad shit happens. No, it's not right but it happens, just because you didn't hear about it in other wars doesn't mean that it doesn't happen either. Oh, and blowing up a Mosque we only do when there is good reason (think bombs) to do so. You're going to believe what you're going to believe no matter what someone tells you, but everything you see on Youtube and the TV isn't necessarily what the person showing it to you tells you it is. Also before you go waving around the Geneva convention about shit you may want to read it, I remember reading somewhere that if the enemy doesn't follow it you don't have to either and I do remember some videos of people having their head sawed off among other things. I feel for the Iraqis, as did most of my compatriots in Iraq but it's not our fault if shit happens... we cannot I repeat cannot tell the difference between the enemy from the innocents so some innocents do get caught in the crossfire. How about you blame the suits who put us there in the first place? I sure as hell didn't want to go and most people in the military are not the bloodthirsty sick fucks you seem to think we are. That's why I got out of the military, I saw way too much and couldn't stand the thought of my little girl never knowing who her daddy was. Nor could I stand to see another little girl dead in the street because some asshole decided to start shooting and grabber her to use as a shield. That made me equal parts angry and sick, I actually vomited when it was over and sometimes I have nightmare because of it. Oh, but you don't see those videos do you?! You also don't see the videos of the guys walking into a crowd of schoolchildren and then setting off a bomb hoping to get one or two soldiers do you? No, because you want to fervently to believe that the soldiers in the service are bloodthirsty animals to soothe your conscience for some strange reason. So you sir can fuck off and maybe try to get your facts straight.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Pardon my French, but these "efforts" are a fucked up mismanaged mess that have slanted all by themselves towards the negative - it's what happens when you roll into a country and toss the government that's been in charge for twenty years without any reasonable plan to end the power vacuum and restore order. What the anti-war crowd wants is for the Bush administration not to fuck this situation up, but it appears to be too late for that. The situation is a mess, it's been handled terribly from every point of view except the military one (I will give them credit - they've done an admirable job when they've had missions to accomplish, the only reason they didn't win the war yet is that the politicians forgot to pin down exactly what "win" would mean in this context, they just thought that things would magically heal themselves and it would be obvious). Yes, America has a badass army that can destroy whatever it wants with very little trouble; unfortunately it also has some mentally challenged leaders that forgot they would need to clean up the mess left by removing an active dictator from a country that's forgotten how to rule itself.
Iraq is no longer a war, after all. A war involves two organized armies having at it, as in with actual commanders and weapons; Iraq is just a bunch of idiots blowing crap up on the roads to scare the people trying to calm things down. We're now trying to quell an insurgency, which is exactly what the anti-war set warned would happen, and warned that we didn't have a plan to deal with. If I recall the response from the Bush administration was that the Iraqis would not do this because they would be so happy to be rid of Saddam. If that had been true, we would have stopped arguing this crap two years ago.
So we're screwed? Should we leave? Who knows...it doesn't appear that things are going very well, which I'm pretty sure even Bush admitted himself, and I really do feel for the Iraqis, so maybe it would be worth sticking it out a little longer to see if we can at least leave things slightly less dangerous than they are now. But as you get yourself all heated up about the anti-war leftist commie shitbag bastards with their patchouli douche and smokable underwear, don't forget this key fact - they were right. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The entire justification for this war was mistaken, even if it was not an outright lie. Iraq was not even on the radar when it came to being a dire threat to the United States. I know the standard right-wing line from here: Saddam was a bad guy, are you saying it would be better if we left him in power? Well, no, I would never argue the world was better with him, yes, he was a real nasty leader. But there are a lot of bad guys out there. If we start wars with each of their countries just because they're bad guys...well, we just can't, for lack of resources, troops, and morale. There are too many places where we don't like the current leadership, and these kinds of missions do not tend to turn out well, either for our country or theirs. We don't have the energy as a nation to keep reliving the same military regime change nightmare over and over. And the fact is, without the WMD "proof" showing that Saddam was a clear, imminent threat, we would never have gone in because people wouldn't have supported it. Unlike politicians (real or armchair), most real people like to be extremely careful about sending their children off to war, so don't underestimate how totally messed up it is that thousands of our people have now died and killed because of a war that probably shouldn't have started at all.
So whatever...the point of this rant is that the Republicans in control of this war are the ones that messed up - it's ridiculous to point a finger at the media and scream "BIAS!" for reporting on it. You can try to spin this a