a. have "established relations with the military",
b. are rated by military contractors as likely to produce "favourable" coverage
c. are subject to revocation of access AND blacklisting for "controversial reporting"
A system that is designed to promote the army's point of view and penalize those that deviate from it will end up producing exactly that.
The problem, and the solution, lies in the rules of embedding:
> A Pentagon spokesman said, “Embeds are a privilege, not a right.”
> If a reporter’s embed status is terminated, typically she or he is blacklisted. This program of limiting press access was challenged in court in 2013 by a freelance reporter, Wayne Anderson, who claimed to have followed his agreement but to have been terminated after publishing adverse reports about the conflict in Afghanistan. The ruling on his case upheld the military’s position that there was no constitutionally protected right to be an embedded journalist.
As long as embeds are considered a "privilege" to be doled out (or rescinded) by the army based on it's own publicity objectives, it's impossible to expect neutral journalism from such a system.
Independent journalism can only be produced by truly independent journalists: journalists who don't depend on the people they're reporting on for their very survival.
Is this possible? Maybe, but we sure haven't seen much of it.
Hoping that traditional embedding will produce true journalism is wishful thinking.
Or maybe the other side should offer to embed western journalists within them; that could prove to be fascinating. As a reader, I would be very interested in what the so-called "bad guys" think, what their motivations are, what goals they're pursuing, how they're fighting, etc.
The concept of press freedom doesn't necessarily seem to include an implied obligation that the government must help them do their jobs.
"Reporting the activities of drug cartels ends up favoring the cartels because they only accept journalists who tell their side of the story."
"We were going to do a big expose on medical malpractice in Regional Hospital, but the administration refused our request for a month-long officially sanctioned observer mission within the hospital so we couldn't."
"It's no wonder that news reports always praise the police, since your ride-along privileges get terminated right away if you don't play along."
Yeah, reporting from a war zone is dangerous and difficult and getting help from the military makes it a lot easier. But that's their job.
And so we have to rely on our traitors and prisoners to do the work for us. I applaud you, Chelsea!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
We have rapid access to more information today about daily violence around the world, be it in Syria or Iraq or Nigeria or North Korea,* than under any other era of information technology.
The problem isn't distribution of information. The problem is that people can't be bothered.
* NK is probably the best example of problems with access to information, their regime keeps a very tight lid on things. Even so, we still all know the country is undergoing systematic repression, forced labor, starvation as a method of controlling the people, along with brutal gulags where torture, rape, and death are your most likely short term outcomes. Look at the "news" stands though. People are only interested in celebrities. They're most likely to associate NK with Dennis Rodman over anything else.
The first thing I want to say is that Manning is describing the Army's approach to journalism coverage. It is quite different from the Marines' approach, which as far as I could tell (and from my vantage point I was in a good position to have a clear understanding) was extremely open. I do not recall any cases of "blacklisting" or otherwise limiting access of journalists to events, leaders or units in our area of operations (AO). I did hear stories about how the Army was handling it and it was, in typical Army fashion, being handled very poorly. I realize this might sound like glib "Semper Fi" jingoism but you'll have to trust me there was a real difference. (BTW the Marine Corps isn't guiltless, I'm sure, but during my time I was pretty proud of our commitment to openness.)
Second, about the tally of reporters. In 2010 the coverage had wound almost completely down because frankly the American people had lost interest. Even in 2007 the number of embed requests we received declined when "peace broke out" during the Anbar "awakening". There's no reason to think that the reason the official count of embeds never rose above 12 (if that's true) because of official limitations. Instead I think it's pretty reasonable to think that is because most embeds would have been quite boring at the time, relatively speaking. It was much easier to sit inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and report from there.
I don't really have a punchy conclusion to put here. Basically, don't believe everything is black or white in this matter. Like everything it was/is a complicated system with a lot of moving parts, and to clump it all into some homogenous bucket is basically give up on actually understanding.
That being said, the NYT is still much more neutral in its reporting than the kremlin-funded Russia Today, which is little more than a propaganda machine, including it's US arm.
I've spent the last few years trying to create a Wikipedia-like system where anyone can curate and fact-check the first hand sources coming out of an event. There is incredible content coming from the people on the ground who, despite having their own opinions, are not blatantly funded by someone who is trying to twist the story to meet their narrative. It seems to be working well so far with hardcore news junkies using it (the group similar to the Wikipedia editors), but we'll have to see in a couple days at the public launch.
At the very least the question of pardoning them should be asked in a live televised debate, to see how the candidates stand. If none of them are willing to commit to that, then there's a very high chance US will continue on the dark path is currently on.
It seems that above all else, mainstream news craves access. Hiring the presidential daughters provides a network like NBC access to those presidential families in a way other networks may not have. Attending the annual White House Correspondents dinner provides reporters access to celebrities and a night out of dining and drinking with the people they're supposed to hold to account for their actions. And being complicit with the military's approach towards how a war should be reported ensures they retain their access to the war "story" - be it factual or massaged.
Recall the story from the NYTimes about the military analysts that networks always put on-air whenever a military story is being covered? If not, it's worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewan...
Real reporting is hard. And when media organizations elect to go along with how a story is presented rather than providing raw, unbiased accounts of things, it does an injustice to the public. And it's made even more difficult when an administration chooses to take an aggressive stance towards journalists regarding how they source and report their stories.
It's never been easier to be a reporter and disseminate information to millions. I can only hope that the public seizes that opportunity and fixes the ways that news is currently broken.
It was a really wrenching exchange as the existing cable mogul defended the status quo, saying something like, "We'd love to have sophisticated news consumers tune in, but those people have complex lives and interests, they don't watch news every night, they just read it quickly online then go to things like the ballet. We run the market experiment with sober, deep, fact-based news every night against PBS. It doesn't win."
It's helpful to realize that even when Fox is top of the ratings, the viewers it has as a percentage of the American population are exceedingly tiny.
In a Gallup poll in 2013, TV still leads, in surveys. But surveys overstate things, because people want to look like they actually consume news. http://www.gallup.com/poll/163412/americans-main-source-news...
On a strong weekday, Fox is looking at maybe 2 million viewers for the entire day: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/06/10/cable-news-ratin... (ie, under a percent of the US population).
It's easy to credit TV news with a larger cultural impact than it actually has.
Iraq never had more than 12 embedded journalists covering 100,000 troops, and they had to be nice or get removed.
Democracy needs transparency and journalism is one of the best means of ensuring this - and it was totally strangled in Iraq so that abuses by Pro-US Iraq groups got no criticism in US - and this leads to no criticism of our military and administration. This fails to be healthy.
There were many, many times where there were more than 12 embeds.
http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/ https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop
And Redphone and the various things Moxie works on: https://whispersystems.org/
But that only makes communications and authenticity possible. Access -- as in embedding problem Manning describes -- and censorship or selection bias will still be a problem. Those seem more like policy issues than technology problems. Along those lines, possibly Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com/) and of course, supporting the EFF (https://www.eff.org/).
Those are my thoughts, but I second your question and hope others have input.
A reddit discussion on looking at the documentary critically.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/25vm20/this_i...
This is why citizen journalism, as rough as it often is, is successful, and why data-based journalism like fiverthirtyeight is the future of professional journalism.
The pre-war coverage had some problems but I thought the reporting about the war, on the whole, was pretty decent. I read a lot about torture and about the lack of press freedom in Iraq.
It's outcome was known and obvious from the get go. You kill the dictator that repress another extremist. What did you think it was going to happen? No retaliation.
America's 'Wars' from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, War on Terror (and War on Drugs) have all been, very, very, very bad. I can't think of a military campaign that accomplished their goals, unless said goals were to cause as much shit as possible and get paid shit ton for doing so.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175854/tomgram%3A_engelhardt...
