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Media democratization on the battlefield

On Oct. 10, David Stanford announced the release of “The Sandbox: Dispatches from troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  The book is a collection of “over 90 posts by almost 40 writers,” all of whom are American military personnel abroad. “The Sandbox” is the title of a blog sponsored by Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau and the online magazine Slate, where the U.S. military can post blogs and pictures.  Trudeau envisioned the Sandbox as “…the unclassified details of deployment - the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd,” without any partisan or political opinions (those are relegated to the website’s Blowback section).

Increasingly, U.S. military personnel and people in war zones are talking about war from the inside. These testimonies, which would have been very difficult if not impossible to disseminate before the information age, often offer a stark contrast to the message presented by government and corporate media. There are hundreds of blogs about war and conflict.  Check out Yahoo’s Iraq War Blogs and Diaries ,at Hereinreality.com’s Iraq Blogs and especially Milblogging.com.

The trend is not limited to blogs.  Last month, seven enlisted men from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne penned an op-ed for The New York Times. In a critique of the Bush administration’s policies, the soldiers declared the effort in Iraq to have failed and the goals of the U.S. to be unachievable.

“In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist militia and criminal violence.”

While the article was being written, one of the seven, Staff Sgt. Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head.  He was expected to live.  On September 12, Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, wrote that two of the other authors, Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray, were “killed in a vehicle accident…just as Gen. David Petraeus was about the report to Congress on progress in the “surge” in Iraq.  The general was actually asked about the op-ed during questioning by U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.  Editor & Publisher also got the reaction of NYT editor Andrew Rosenthal.

The juxtaposition of seven non-commissioned soldiers writing an op-ed for a major newspaper that affects the questioning of the general who commands them is, in the words of Slate’s Fred Kaplan, “unprecedented.”  Although it appeared in traditional media, the op-ed was symbolic of what citizen journalism is all about.  Average people, in this case average soldiers, can tell the world what they see, and not even the system of the military can stop it.

In 2003, U.S. Marine Capt. Josh Rushing, press officer for U.S. Central Command, was shown in an ongoing conversation with al-Jazeera’s Hassan Ibrahim in the documentary “Control Room.” Rushing, who began as a committed proponent of Washington’s policies, slowly began to see the Iraq War in a different light. Not realizing he’d been in a documentary until after Control Room’s release, Rushing was ordered, after the film’s release, not to discuss it.  He subsequently left the military and became a correspondent for al-Jazeera International. National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” has been following Rushing’s story, first in a May 2004 interview with Control Room’s co-director Jehane Noujaim (in which Rushing was prohibited from participating) and then in interviews with Rushing himself, in October 2004 and most recently in June 2007.

This American Life has broadcast many interesting wartime stories, including a November 2005 episode, “Strangers in a Strange Land.” Amy O’Leary tells the story of military blogging, featuring three different blogs read by the authors themselves. One of these, by Colby Buzzell, was made into the book “My War: Killing Time in Iraq.”  In another episode, Iraqi teenager, Haider Hamsa, goes from the Iraqi interior Ministry of Information to working as a correspondent for the American media. Hyder Akbar, whose father works for the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, was featured in two stories on January 2003 and November 2005. Also check out “Somewhere in the Arabian Sea” and several others episodes with stories about Iraq.

It has been theorized that the Vietnam War and its embedded reporters helped fuel the peace movement in the U.S. in the 1970s. This may be why, during the Liberation of Kuwait, there were widespread allegations of media control by the military.  Just over a decade later, seven enlisted soldiers in Iraq can write an article for The New York Times and even terrorists have blogs. Governments and militaries no longer have exclusive control over the dialog of war, and it will be telling to follow how democratized media affects the “war of hearts and minds” in the future.

Tags: afghanistan, blog post, conflict, iraq, the sandbox, us military,

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