{"id":1175,"date":"2006-08-08T01:21:47","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T01:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:50","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:50","slug":"the_war_inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1175","title":{"rendered":"The War Inside Your Television Set"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a given that the current conflict is above all a media war. We’re fighting to change people’s perceptions and behavior, and attempting to do so without the level of violence that someone like Clauswitz was talking about when he said that “the object of war is to bend the enemy to your will”.<\/p>\n

There are two debates going on right now around this. One involves media manipulation on both sides; one involves attempts to understand and ‘calibrate’ the level of violence we’d accept in the course of the combat in Iraq and Lebanon. I’ll talk about the latter in a bit.<\/p>\n

In the first, there’s clear evidence that folks on the other side are managing the flow of information.<\/p>\n

Start with this account<\/a> from Anderson Cooper:<\/p>\n

“This is a heavily orchestrated Hizbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they’ve been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians. That’s the story that Hizbollah wants people to know about.<\/p>\n

\nThese ambulances aren’t responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note the picture associated with the story:<\/p>\n

\"2006-07-24-CNNCooper2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Go read the story – it’s what a good journalist would be reporting along with the direct reporting of what’s being shown him or her.<\/p>\n

Now go to the ‘Drinking From Home<\/a>‘ blog, and note the two pictures – of the same woman, bewailing the destruction of two different buildings on two different days.<\/p>\n

For grins, I’d love to get a better picture of the similarly-dressed (yes, I know many religious Muslim women wear similar garb) woman in the CNN picture above…wouldn’t it be interesting to see if she’s the same woman?<\/p>\n

Rusty Shackelford<\/a> goes on to show that the Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj manipulated photos of Israeli fighters (captioned as firing missiles when actually shooting off an antimissile flare), as well as Photoshopped pictures of the bombed Lebanese landscape.<\/p>\n

It’s clear that Hizbollah – like Al Quieda in general, including the forces we’re fighting in Iraq – are fighting an information war, and do so consciously.<\/p>\n

And, I’ll argue, it has an impact.<\/p>\n

The perception in the media is, variously, that they are implacable fighters while our soldiers are brutal killers and our efforts harm mostly civilians.<\/p>\n

This perception is powerful both in its impact on us and our perception of – and so decisions about – the war, and on their own population who are being asked to decide whether their reaction to Israeli bombs is rage at Hizbollah or Israel.<\/p>\n

So how do we react?<\/p>\n

Interestingly, it seems that we tried to, at least in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Marc Lynch, blogging at Abu Aardvark<\/a>, has a post reviewing a new U.S. Army monograph on “Information Operations in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom — What Went Wrong?<\/a>”<\/p>\n

The root paper is interesting (and deserves a post of it’s own), but I want to focus on one of Marc’s conclusions (the second conclusion is also important, and I even agree – if we were funding the blossoming of news outlets in Iraq and then using it as a metric of success there are some possible serious problems there…):<\/p>\n

First, if you recall the Lincoln Group fiasco, the problem there wasn’t that “good news” articles were being placed in the Iraqi press, or even that they were paying for play – it was that the origin of those articles was concealed to make it look like they came from Iraqis rather than from Americans. That’s a big no no. If the PSYOPS newspapers, radio and television stations were not clearly identified as American military outlets, and were presented as genuine Iraqi outlets, then it would be the Lincoln Group fiasco on a much larger scale… and carried out by the military itself and not by an amateurish, unqualified contractor. That’s a big “if”, and it is not clear from the report.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d wonder why, exactly, it’s such a big ‘no-no’, and welcome comments from Marc or others on that. My recollection is that it was a big ‘no-no’ because folks who were opposed to the war seized on it as evidence of American duplicity. I’m not sure how different the outcome would have been if the news had gone out under American bylines; they claim of duplicity would have simply been moved from the source to the content.<\/p>\n

So on one hand, we’re getting rolled in the media by the oter side, and on the other, we seem to be precluded from managing newsflow because when we’re caught, it will be so embarassing that we’ll lose all credibility.<\/p>\n

A challenging conundrum.<\/p>\n

Why is it so challenging?<\/p>\n

Well, I’ll go back to my earlier writing about the role of media and the citizenship obligations of journalists.<\/p>\n

On one hand, their role is to see things and share them.<\/p>\n

On the other, they are members of a polity who – to some extent – share the interests and goals of the polity.<\/p>\n

As I’ve discussed, it’s not so clear that goal #1 – the search for the great image, soundbite, or lede – hasn’t completely eclipsed goal #2.<\/p>\n

Edward R. Murrow seemed to do a pretty good job at seeing things and telling stories about them. He also didn’t seem to have a lot of trouble<\/a> remembering which side he was on.<\/p>\n

How do you think he’d have reacted when Hizbollah tried to stage-manage the news in front of him?<\/p>\n

Why is it that so far, only one mainstream journalist has stood up on the issue? Maybe I’m undercounting – and God, I’d love to be wrong on this.<\/p>\n

But if we allow the media to be managed against us – and here I’m not suggesting that the media are traitors, just that their perception of their job – as Mike Wallace<\/a> put it – wasn’t to say “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal says “There is an information war. Do we even know we’re fighting it?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}