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Media democratization on the battlefield II

It was with no small level of gratification that I noticed, last week, that the prestigious Poynter Institute published an E-Media Tidbit about milblogging, and that milblogging was featured prominently in Salon’s We are the Thought Police.  With such good company it seems only reasonable to keep up my own commentary.

The Salon article began with a nod in the direction of George Orwell’s 1984, recalling Orwell’s fear that technology would one day be used as a tool of political control, comparing Orwell’s Newspeak with Bush administration rhetoric in the lead-up to war in Iraq.  But, says author Michael Massing:

“…those [technological] advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources….In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field.  Through ‘milblogs,’ soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground.”

Thus the Orwellian paradigm has been undone by the very technology Orwell predicted would enable it. The real danger, and chilling effect, says Massing, is the extent to which Americans “have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive.”

The article also mentions journalist Kevin Sites, who was working for the American network NBC covering the Iraq war. During the battle of Fallujah, he recorded the now infamous footage of a Marine in a mosque shooting an unarmed, wounded Iraqi. The footage was edited by NBC to stop just before the soldier shot the man, although it was shown on Arab television unedited. The Marine in question was not charged with any crime.

The video was so controversial that NBC pulled Sites out of Iraq. Thereafter, he proceeded to receive a large amount of hate mail.  Massing mentions one that began, “Dear Liberal Media Scumbag, I hope the next video clip out of Iraq I watch is an insurgent placing your severed head onto your back.” Typical of this sort of criticism is an article on the conservative World Net Daily, which accused Sites of being an “anti-war activist” and included comments calling him a “traitor,” among other things.

The first time I saw Kevin Sites was in an interview with journalist Lowell Bergman on PBS’s Frontline, when Bergman called Sites jokingly “the pretty face.” Sites had just moved to Yahoo News as their first foreign correspondent in a feature called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, a yearlong, online series in over twenty major conflict sites around the world.  He told Bergman…

“I think news organizations are much more willing to send out independent SoJo’s, Solo-Journalists like myself, into war zones.  They don’t necessarily want them to do…an extensive documentary, because they’re not going to get the same kind of product.”

Solo Journalism is exactly what it sounds like.  Sites himself carries a backpack with a digital camera, a digital video recorder and a laptop with a satellite modem.  He often works alone, creating and filing his own material.  He started covering war zones and disasters in 2000, and at the completion of the Hot Zone project he began a series called People on the Web, about people using the web for unique applications.  Chapters of a documentary about Sites and his Hot Zone project are currently being shown on Yahoo, with one new chapter a week.

Sites just released a book about the year abroad covering war, titled the same as his website, and it includes a CD of the documentary on the Hot Zone website. In an interview with On the Media’s Bob Garfield, Sites said that, many times, people in war zones were very relieved to have someone listen to them and tell their story.  He said that, at its peak, the Hot Zone series was getting about 2 million viewers a week, and though it didn’t have the impact he’d hoped, he said it was important to show the “collateral damage” of war, those ordinary people who are normally not featured in mainstream news.

A few weeks ago, I said that media democratization on the battlefield was “what citizen journalism is all about. Average people…can tell the world what they see, and not even the…military can stop it.” There is now, as ever before, the need for people to be exposed to the realities of conflict, to pierce the abstractions and see the effects on humanity beneath. 

While the conjecture can be made that many Europeans are generally opposed to war – perhaps a result of their own recent history – the United States is different.  Geographic isolation has had the benefit of keeping Americans comfortably isolated until the modern era, when 9/11 changed the perception of invulnerability and opened the way to that Newspeak concept, “preemptive war.” First in Afghanistan, then Iraq and maybe in the near future, Iran.

Geographic isolation.  Perhaps that is why Kevin Sites received such overwhelming vitriol for his decision to show what appears to be a US Marine killing a man in cold blood.  “Pretty face” or not, it takes guts to travel the world and risk one’s own life to show the reality of war, especially when, in doing so, many of your own countrymen call you a traitor. 

Tags: george bush, george orwell, mainstream journalist, military blogging, nbc, technology,

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