Blogs over Baghdad
By Paul McLeary Posted Apr 1 2007
When Coalition forces stormed into Iraq on March 20, 2003, mixed in with the Army and Marine combat units were more than 700 embedded reporters who filed stories from the “tip of the spear” during the push toward Baghdad. These reporters ate the same food, lived in the same conditions and dodged the same bullets as the soldiers they traveled with, yet when their stories came
out, they were attacked by critics for getting it all wrong.
The first wave came from those who complained that embedded reporters were little more than freelance public relations officers for the military, since they were, for all intents and purposes, part of the military unit in the field. These complaints were eventually drowned out by their opposite: that the media were openly hostile to the military, the war and its aims in general, and their stories from the war betrayed this bias.
Some of the most strident critics of the way in which the news media has handled the coverage of the war have come from a group of pro-war bloggers who banded together into a loose confederation of “milbloggers,” — blogese for “military bloggers” — and write about the war either as stateside press critics or as soldiers currently doing the fighting on the front lines. One Web site, http://www.milblogging.com, owned by Military.com and run by Iraq veteran J.P. Borda, currently indexes 1,678 military blogs registered on its network, in 29 countries, with a total of 2,789 registered members.
Milblogging, however, is largely a U.S. phenomenon, and nearly all non-U.S.A. entries are run by Americans serving overseas. What’s more, these military-oriented bloggers, if they do indeed constitute a movement, have coordinated their efforts enough to be able to host a Milblogger conference in Arlington, Virginia, in early May, and in a show of how seriously the military is taking their combined power, the Army is sending an “Electronic Media Engagement Officer” to speak at one of the panels.
So who exactly are these bloggers? For a view inside, look at a random sampling from milblogging.com by Sgt. 1st Class Chuck Grist, a veteran of Vietnam and Operation Iraqi Freedom who writes at http://www.americanranger.blogspot.com.
In an entry from late February, Grist wrote of training soldiers who are preparing to deploy into combat in Iraq: “As I look upon each new squad or platoon, I am reminded of the look of innocence of those who travel the road of war for the first time. They will not return with that same fresh look; their innocence will slowly dissolve among the harsh realities of man’s most horrible game. Sometimes an old soldier will see the faces of lost comrades among the ranks of a new generation of troops. They will appear like shadows that are visible one moment, but gone the next. Such visions remind us that the long line of American warriors is an endless one.”
But the phenomena of these bloggers goes well beyond a group of patriotic Americans supporting the troops from the home front and soldiers stealing a few minutes to convey their experiences in a war-time military. The blogs also offer their fair share of knee-jerk, jingoistic content that has less to do with the military than it does with a far-right viewpoint that blames the media and liberals for just about all that ills the nation. Blogs such as Hot Air regularly blame the media for actively working for American defeat in Iraq, as when CNN broadcast footage of an Iraqi sniper at work in October 2006. Hot Air wrote that CNN aired the footage “because it does lower morale among waverers and helps them accomplish their political goal of defeat.”
This isn’t to say that all milbloggers succumb to such easy scapegoating, but it is a part of the landscape and to ignore it is to sweep under the rug an important part of the form’s popularity.
But the ranks of milbloggers also contain another critically important group of bloggers — private citizens who actually travel to the war zone to do their own reporting. If there ever was a time to dig up the charge of “free military PR,” it would seem that this would be it, as too often these bloggers rely on hagiographic accounts of the work that American soldiers and Marines are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not always. The relationship between bloggers and the military hasn’t always been smooth, and as the war grinds on, fissures have developed.
The tension between supporting the war and legitimately criticizing failed military policies was thrust into the spotlight in October 2006, when one of the most influential milbloggers, Michael Yon — a private citizen who writes at http://www.MichaelYon-online.com, as well as for a few conservative magazines, and has embedded in Iraq and Afghanistan repeatedly over the last several years — attacked the military’s embedding practices.
In July 2006, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) in Baghdad, which processes and approves all embedded reporters in Iraq, denied Yon’s most recent attempt to embed in Iraq, writing that “I do not recognize your Web site as a media organization that we will use as a source to credential journalists covering MNF-I operations.”
Writing in the Weekly Standard, Yon decried the increasingly complicated hoops the military has made reporters, and especially bloggers, jump through when trying to embed. Yon wrote that “the bungling gatekeepers at the Combined Press Information Center (CPIC) reciprocate with ridiculous and costly obstacles that deter embedded media covering our forces, ultimately causing harm to only one side: ours.”
Since the incident, Johnson completed his tour and was replaced by Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver as head of CPIC. In an interview conducted with Garver late last year — after Yon was eventually allowed to embed — he denied that the military was giving bloggers a hard time, and said that he was trying to iron out the flaws in the program. “The unit schedule is really the big driver” in granting embeds, he said. “We’re changing out the division in Baghdad, and everyone wants to go to Baghdad, but right now I can send you out West, up North, down South, but since the change right now, we can’t send embeds.”
On the blogger issue, he said that “I’m not blocking someone because they’re a blogger,” but that when dealing with bloggers, the military is “going to evaluate ‘what is this person’s reach? Where do they stand in the blogosphere?’” He added that his office is “trying to make sure that we’re getting to the maximum number of American people when we are taking somebody in, and what kind of effect they’re having in the blogosphere. Am I saying I won’t prevent a blogger from coming out? I’m not saying that because I may. But will I summarily say ‘No blogger can come out?’ No, I’m not going to do that, either. We’re trying to open it up, we’re trying to allow access, and we’re trying to get the biggest bang for the buck that we can with that access.”
In other words, the milblogging universe, as egalitarian as any other blogging entity out there, is beginning to separate itself just like any other media entity — between the big boys and the small timers. But one thing will remain the same: the public’s thirst for real-time reporting from the middle of the action, which is something milbloggers (at least those embedded with the troops) and active duty soldiers can do better than many newspapers, magazines and television news shows — if only because milbloggers are unencumbered by the time and staffing constraints imposed by the traditional media.
This isn’t to say that blogs, or milblogs, are the answer to all that ails the coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from it. Too often their politics — meaning their visceral hatred of war opponents, the media and liberals in general — weigh down their ability to tell a story and color the writing enough to turn many people off. And that’s a shame, because those bloggers who do get to embed in combat zones offer a critical grounds-eye perspective of the daily lives of our soldiers that goes woefully unreported in much of the mainstream media.