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The Blog is Mightier Than the Sword

Micah L. Sifry | December 6, 2004 - 3:06pm | 3 comments | Email This!

The Pentagon has long been one of the most net-savvy of all government departments, especially in its dealings with the media. (Take for example its posting of verbatim transcripts of reporters' interviews with top DOD officials, as a way for the public to judge whether reporters are being fair in their articles.) But this Washington Post article by Thomas Ricks suggests that while the military is trying to convince the public that the battle for Fallujah was a success (using a 59-page Powerpoint presentation called "Telling the Fallujah Story to the World"), a part-time blogger is matching them click-for-click with a far more critical take with a site called "Fallujah in Pictures: The War You Won't See on TV."

Ricks reports:

"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. "IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war."

An Army soldier who fought in the Sunni Triangle last year and maintains a blog himself agreed. "The winner has to be the blog," he said. "There's something all too visceral about seeing the pictures of the dead and wounded, on both sides, which overwhelms static displays of weaponry" in the military presentation.

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Comments

Dissenting thoughts on the power of the blog

by Jon Garfunkel on December 7, 2004 - 2:37am

hmmph. I would have classified this under "blog triumphalism" and "comparative media." It's night and day comparing Pentagon PowerPoint with a participatory photographic pastiche. I was hoping that the "click-for-click" comparison would literally pair up against the powerpoint slides, but I don't get that sense looking the blog (do not have PPT on my home PC).

When the blogger says "there is an emotional truth to the war, and it's not being shown" in the U.S. media, I wonder if he's making the same mistake that I often do, turning past the hard news to read the opinions and analysis. Thanksgiving weekend I turned to Jack Shafer in Slate to tell me about truly heroic war coverage by Dexter Filkins of the Times. Emotional truth? I think plenty of that seeps through written accounts. Shafer writes, "Filkins avoids the purple prose, the clichés, the antiwar declarations, and the patriotic riffs that seduce lesser chroniclers of war. His play-by-play requires almost no commentary as he collects the images and testimonials and patches them into his spare narrative." Here's a passagefrom Filkins that moved me considerably:

"More than once, death crept up and snatched a member of Bravo Company and quietly slipped away. Cpl. Nick Ziolkowski, nicknamed Ski, was a Bravo Company sniper. For hours at a stretch, Corporal Ziolkowski would sit on a rooftop, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40 rifle, waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big and wide, and Corporal Ziolkowski often took off his helmet to get a better look."

[interesting stuff about Ziolkowski's background I skip over in the interest of brevity.]

"The bullet knocked Corporal Ziolkowski backward and onto the roof. He had been sitting there on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had taken his helmet off to get a better view. The bullet hit him in the head."

I didn't need to see a photograph of this-- in my mind's eye I had the cinematic image from the beginning of Saving Private Ryan where on Normandy Beach a GI takes off his helmet, happy that it just saved his life by deflecting a bullet...

So for a fair comparison-- which communicates the battle of Fallujah best? I'd consider the Times coverage as well. But I defer to you, Micah, as you have much more experience than I in this field.

Jon

The living-room war

by Micah L. Sifry on December 7, 2004 - 3:02pm

My point was simply that even the mighty Pentagon information machine could be effectively countered by a simple blog--not that this blog has matched the DOD Powerpoint presentation line for line. What the military veterans I quoted are saying is that the visceral, emotional power of war images are difficult to trump. In the 1960s this was the "living-room war" in Vietnam brought home by network news to people eating their dinners. Now it's being brought home on the web.

and the computer room war

by Jon Garfunkel on December 8, 2004 - 12:50am

During my dinnertime I watch Keith Olbermann, usually finishing in time for OddBall-- and then hit the computer in the other room.
Sorry for the long post, but I did want to add the flavor of the Times reporting. I stick by my point: the article didn't compare to other familiar media coverages. And I'm still stuck on Cass Sunstein's Republic.com hypothesis, that a transparently partisan community/media does not foster deliberation (and thus change minds) as effectively as than a nonpartisan commons.

Jon