US Military Launches YouTube Channel 348
Jenga717 writes "The US military has launched its own channel on YouTube, in efforts to shift the media's focus of Iraq from a negative to a more positive light, and to 'counter the messages of anti-American sites.' From the article: 'The footage is not picked specifically to show the military in a good light ... and is only edited for reasons of time or content too graphic to be shown on YouTube ... And while all the clips currently posted have been shot by the military's combat cameramen, soldiers and marines have been invited to submit their own clips.' The question is, where are they supposed to submit them? Starting 'on or about 14 May 2007', the Department of Defense will block troop access to Myspace, Youtube, MTV, and more sites, due to a 'growing concern for our unclassified DoD Internet, known as the NIPRNET'." More commentary below.
The troops will be unable to access these sites from any computer on the DoD network, yet are still able to access them from their home computers — which they can't use on the DoD network. So why the censorship? The DoD cites security reasons, but the Commander of Global Network Operations (DoD's Joint Task Force)"has noted a significant increase in the use of DoD network resources tied up by individuals visiting certain recreational Internet sites." The PDF released by the DoD reminds troops that this "benefits not only you, your fellow Servicemembers, and Civilian employees, but preserves our vital networks for conducting official DoD business in peace and war." Sounds like quite a sticky situation."
dont watch it then (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The truth (Score:4, Insightful)
How many bad cops are there, really? But there are plenty of people that paint them all with the same brush. I'm not saying that the military is filled with righteous humanitarians who just get stuck in a rough spot every now and again. But the fact is that bad news sells and good news doesn't. When given the choice between bad news and good news, the bad news will win every time. That having been said, I don't think the DoD should be in the business of making sure their side of the story gets told. I know people over there now, and have few friends that have made it back. It's still a war, they're still in the military, and the story isn't going to be all rosy. Or all bad.
Editorial decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh really? So what is the criteria then? number of shots on target? cost to the taxpayer of munitions expended? rounds discharged per second?
Entertainment value?
I mean, c'mon, that's just such a silly statement. What other reason can the military ever have for releasing any media at all beyond terse official communiques?
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Mission Accomplished"
"Let Freedom Reign!"
Who is spouting unfounded propoganda, again?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I'm not saying bias doesn't exist in the various media outlets, but of the two entities (media and military) which has a history of, and a purpose for, propoganda?
Saying that the military is being objective and the media is the propoganda.. that seems to go a bit beyond objectivity.
Re:Why the propaganda? (Score:2, Insightful)
The military isn't the one that said that we should invade Iraq. All CIA and defense intelligence reports supported the worldwide consensus that Iraq could be contained and that the WMD reports were not conclusive. But Bush and Cheney's lackeys liberally interpreted those reports and suppressed others to make their case to invade Iraq. The military isn't part of the political decision process that failed us, nor did we empower them with any means to do so. The military is just trying to win an unwinnable war that they were forced into by the President and Congress.
If you want to blame someone, blame those who doctored the intelligence briefings and who exaggerated the claims. Blame those who gave the President the power to wage war without any checks and balances. Blame the new political class who has not only discarded isolationalism, but has completely embraced interventionalism. Blame those who ignored President Eisenhower's extremely blunt warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex (his speech at the end of his Presidency). Blame those who think we need to keep a standing army of the same size we had during the Cold War. Don't blame the 18 or 20 year old kids who are over there because or system failed them. If you are an American, then you are part of the system that *ordered* those kids to go over there and die. Don't blame them when you don't like the results that your system chose.
This does nothing. (Score:2, Insightful)
The only way that this is about the troops at all is in the sense that they are even there in the first place. This is about the U.S. invading a sovereign nation on false pretences. It is about our soldiers dying not for our safety, to keep the country free, or to liberate an oppressed people, but simply for oil interests. It is about the Iraqi families which have been torn apart, killed, and subjected to death and destruction every day, caused by both extremist groups and U.S. forces. It is about placing the security of the country in the hands of NATO, aggressive multinational diplomacy, and rebuilding the infrastructure of a decimated country.
Showing us that the U.S. troops are performing their given tasks is going to accomplish absolutely nothing at all.
Re:Editorial decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
To recruit.
I've seen TV ads where an FPS turns into the US Army video - albeit a little "Saving Private Ryan" hue to it all - and then a "sarge" shouting about the real challenge.
The people who watch videos on youtube are the target recruiting age demographic.
Re:Why the propaganda? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like put up Youtube sites depiciting military actions in a positive light?
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, your second paragraph is either an emotional appeal or a non-sequitur. It's perfectly possible to remove an evil dictator from power while also raping, looting and pillaging—you've simply used the first sentence to provide justification for the act and the second sentence to focus on consequences of the act. (The issue of whether a country is "liberated" or "conquered" is, admittedly, a nontrivial, political one. However, when a country invades another, removes an oppressive regime, and then replaces it with a government friendly to the invading country, both words may very well be said to apply—the invading country has both liberated the invaded country from that dictator, and secured itself a position of power in the new political situation(which is bluntly what conquest is all about—power, not necessarily explicit flag-planting).)
The war at home. (Score:5, Insightful)
I accept that this may be modded offtopic. It just pisses me off that everyone is pushing their agendas via a medium that has such potential to empower.
The media climate has reached a point where even if I were to put together a youtube series depicting the life of veterans after returning to the states, chronicling both their triumphs and their tragedies, the series would be politicized by all the f*cking pundits and bloggers and politicians to where very few people could view it without preconcieved notions about my own personal opinions about war, politics, and the state of our democracy.
Anyone else out there feel like you can't even trust what you see with your own eyes anymore? Do any other Americans out there feel like it is damn near impossible to speak directly to your fellow countrymen without having your words filtered through the opinions of the talking heads that fill their t.v. screens and babble out of their radios?
Regards.
That depends on how you define it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wars are hard to cover, and the mish-mash conflict/counter-insurgency that is Iraq is no exception. The problems are similar to those of any other big, contentious political conflict, such as elections, only now people are shooting each other, a reporter's access is often limited to a certain area and frequently only to one side, and the emotions run about 100 times stronger.
I like the use of the word "propaganda" in Spanish better, as a word used to describe any advertisement as well as its perhaps less savory meanings. Propaganda tries to influence people, yes, but it can play a role in informing people. A car ad, for example, informs me about say the gas mileage of a car and attempts to convince me to buy the car at the same time. The information regarding gas mileage is accurate and factual, but it is not simply handed to me straight - it's done in a persuasive manner.
News "reporting" has become more of the same, as the 24 hour networks seem to have a system where supposedly unbiased reports - and don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're all biased - are viewed, and then commentary from a pundit whose main qualification is having an opinion is solicited, and this commentary runs just as long if not longer than the report itself. I for one am tired of hearing Jack Cafferty, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs (I particularly dislike Dobbs, but that's another post), Hannity and Colmes blabber on.
The problems are not simply ones of bias - it's a lack of depth, and this problem exists on the supply and demand sides as well. American news outlets have consistently cut back on international news for well over a decade now, and other than a few select cities worldwide most simply don't have correspondents overseas. The results of this problem could easily be seen in the recent Israeli-Lebanese (well, whoever exactly the other party was - it was pretty nebulous) conflict last summer. The major wire services, news outlets, etc. simply didn't have many reporters in Beirut to keep track of things. They flew out their usual talking heads and depended on the information of local stringers, who often have their own agendas and biases built in. A textbook example of this would be the Adnan Hajj photography controversy [wikipedia.org] - a local stringer who doctored photos and used misleading captions to get his point across.
Keeping reporters overseas is expensive, and combat embeds - the safest method of transportation for journalists in Iraq - isn't exactly cheap, either. If you notice, television coverage in the U.S. is often interspersed with clips of combat and other footage from the Iraq conflict recorded during the invasion over four years ago. Or from the latest 12 - 24 hour embed a reporter did with a unit, which is hardly sufficient time to get to know things. Troops also hate these short embeds, something I say from personal experience not as a soldier but from long discussions I had with a French friend talking about his military experience in Afghanistan as a unit commander. Reporters often kept his group from getting the job done. After putting up with a few embeds, he told all those who followed that if fighting occurred they were on their own - and he sure hoped they brought weapons and ammunition.
But there's another reason for this lack of depth of coverage: Americans don't really care about what's going on in the world. Fewer than 20% of Americans have a passport at any given time, and I'd wager that 4 years into a massive troop deployment in Iraq more than 50% of the public still couldn't find the place on a map or identify its capital city. Americans tend to have strong moral feelings about war in general, good and bad, but few and far between are those actually informed. This apathy combined with the extremely
Re:See All of you! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry for the 3 people you know that came back. I know a few that didn't come back, and I know hundreds who have been over there for months to years. I suppose the fact that I was there makes me a baby killing, civilian raping, prisoner torturing asshole too huh? Well I'm certainly glad that the people like you are far away from the field and with no weapons, the 15-20 iraqi locals riding on a flatbed doing random work on the base (trash, sandbags, etc) all started waving and smiling at our group on my first day there. I would much rather be surrounded by the people that see that the military is doing its best to try and help (far from the politicians goals).
Go watch your local news and see how many 'good deeds' type stuff gets reported, and then see how many murderous rampages and serial killings get reported, and how much coverage each gets. Then ask "gee, I wonder what more people watch and where they get their ratings". Then think for just one moment "I wonder if the news channels are doing the same thing with the war that they do with our local news, showing the most disturbing and horrific things for ratings and glossing over the mundane and good because noone pays attention to it".
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh . . . I did watch any channel other than Fox during the first part of the war, and I was never put under the impression that we were losing any battles, let alone the war.
But I saw members of the UN inspection team state that they didn't think Sadaam had wepaons of mass destruction. I was presented with ex-generals commenting that we weren't going in with enough troops to keep control, which turned out to be true. I heard people speaking against de-Baathicization, because if firing all of them it would be impossible to replace the compentent staff, and also because too many people would be out of work, desperate for money, and with plenty of time on their hands to do mischief; both of those turned out to be true. I heard comments on how we weren't prepared to protect assets like national treasures, infrastructure, and amories (which is related to the above) - also turned out to be true.
From the administration all I got was lies and misdirections about why America was starting a war and how successful it was.
Bob Herbert: (Score:4, Insightful)
More than 90 million Americans, close to a third of the entire population, are struggling to make ends meet on incomes that are less than twice the official poverty line. In my book, they're poor.
The number of poor people in America has increased by five million over the past six years, and the gap between rich and poor has grown to historic proportions. The richest one percent of Americans got nearly 20 percent of the nation's income in 2005, while the poorest 20 percent could collectively garner only a measly 3.4 percent. [nytimes.com]
So, what makes America more secure? "Fighting" "terrorists", or using the 150 Billion to support those at home?
It's the IMPACT, not the number. (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably. But that doesn't matter.
The IMPACT of a single innocent child being killed by our troops outweighs a literal TON of candy and flowers being handed out.
Meanwhile, comments from REAL military leaders
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/12/ap/nati
So dead women and children don't matter to the officers in charge.
Again, read the above link.
The problem is that this is now an occupation. We are occupying Iraq. But we are still treating it as an invasion.
We need to switch our strategy to law enforcement now. No more bombings. No more tanks.
The war is over. We won. But we're still going to lose Iraq because we cannot understand that police work is not the same as calling in another bombing run.
And the fault of that is our government AND the military leadership.
Our troops WILL crack under pressure. We KNOW that. Yet we keep putting more pressure on them because we still believe that Iraq is a "war" when we are really an occupation force.
The military leadership refuses to tell the politicians "NO".
Iraq IS a tragedy.
We paint schools and then shoot the parents of the children because they're traveling too fast when they approach our road block. How is that anything other than tragic?
Our troops are PEOPLE, not machines. They cannot take the continued stress.
And now we're extending their tours.
Re:Editorial decisions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the invasion worked. No one ever doubted that. The media never questioned the official line right up until Abu Ghraib. Then they said, "What the hell?" just like anyone reasonable person would. Then they decided to report that for all the talk of "supporting the troops," the solidiers didn't have enough armor. It's just that now the official line has diveged so much from reality, you can't ignore it. Do you honestly believe Tony Snow believes himself when he compares Baghdad to when Washington DC was the "murder capital?"
It's convient to say that no one know what's going on, but that's simply isn't true. There's a civil war on, and the situation in Iraq has steadily gotten worse. Hell, Cheney is over there in May 9th and says, "Violence is down fairly dramatically," And then an explosion rocks the very building. This week the State Department said that everyone going outside the buildings in the green zone needs to wear body armor. This is bad. 30 bodies a day are being found. That's the work of militia death squads. Four years ago, we didn't have those problems. The Iraqi Ministry of Education reports [alertnet.org] that only 30% of school aged children attend class, because they're parents fear for their safety. That's down from 75% last year. There's been a steady exodus [guardian.co.uk] of highly educated professionals from that country. We're talking doctors, teachers, people needed to maintain a cohesive society. McCain visits Baghdad and says, "Look I can walk though a market, and the generals don't need armor." He had 100 guards, armor, and attack helicopters with him, to walk through a market that mostly closed becaused no one wanted their picture taken with the Americans. The Army issued a statment saying that McCain was "mistaken" when he said Prateaus would go about Baghdad without armor. McCain didn't even belive himself.
This situation in Iraq is is bad. It is very very bad.
It's very convienent and comforting to believe that Fox is telling the truth, and everyone else is lying, but that simply isn't true. Even if you ignore the fact that Fox News has gone lockstep with the Republican party since its inception; you have the entire world media on one side, and then you have Fox News. Who you going to believe? Well obviously Fox, since everyone hates America, including a majority of Americans.
Fox News demostably has lousy coverage. Numerious media studies have show that people that primarily get their information from Fox News are grossly misinformed. But I'm sure that's just because reality has a well known liberal bias.
Re:What the Anti-War/Anti-Troops Crowd wants... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll bite...
Who is anti troops? The only people who are anti troops are the right wing nuts that want the troops to die because of their crazy religious beliefs. We all know that during Vietnam a lot of people WERE anti troops. It was a terrible thing but we moved past it. People understand not to blame the troops anymore. It's a really easy way to attack someone to say they are anti troops but it just isn't ever the case any more. By using this arguing tactic you are showing how morally bankrupt you are and how indefensible your position is.
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the Anti-War/Anti-Troops Crowd wants... (Score:0, Insightful)
Troops are not allowed to think for themselves so we can't blame them can we?
During the Vietnam war it was wrong to blame the troops, but in this war? they are all volunteers
Not With My Taxes, Thanks (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Congressionally-mandated enforcement of business ethics. It is a waste of taxpayer resources to have GIs visiting sites such as YouTube, MTV, etc., as these sites are not mission essential. (Something possibly only the over-30, not still living with mommy crowd might understand.)
2. Operational security prohibits visiting any web site that permits posting of messages, or in this case, videos. Residents of the 5-pointed cesspool have seen too many instances of publicly accessible forums used by DoD personnel to post information about operations that are yet to occur. It's the old, "Loose lips, sinks ships," mindset. Rightfully so.
!%$@#%#@! Slashdot is blocked on my DoD system, so I had to go home to Mommy's house and post this.
Consensus is propaganda is consensus is propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
I am sure more than one philosopher has written about this at length. Doxa vs. episteme etc.
Anyone who thinks the Game (I call it "The Second Great Game" to put its proper historical perspective) is over when we have Persia in a pincer between Bactria and Babylonia, what a lightweight twit to be so blown about by public opinion, so ignorant of history... well I am hoping that reality is far more textured and profound than any consensus!
Consensus is doxa, hearsay, trivia, rumor, crap. Even legend and outright myth have more truth than does public opinion.
If we do lose this, well I am sure more than one good author has written at length about that scenario, that desire of public opinion that fart of a million asses:
Dan Simmons [dansimmons.com]
Orson Scott Card [realclearpolitics.com]
Re:Isn't that the definition of.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I would challenge most politicians to walk through South Central LA without adequate precautions.
Some nut job in Iraq blows up 30 people and it's a civil war. Some nut job in VA kills 30 people and it's a nut job.
For the most part the large majority of Iraqi territory is doing very well thank you. You don't hear about that on the evening news (see previous comments on this topic).
Yes, there is violence. But it is being perpetrated by a minority of the populace. The VAST majority just want to be left alone. But Islamofacists need to be in control, have everyone toe their line, so they kill to terrorize.
Re:What the Anti-War/Anti-Troops Crowd wants... (Score:1, Insightful)
can we say Guantanamo....
Re:What the Anti-War/Anti-Troops Crowd wants... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pardon my French, but these "efforts" are a fucked up mismanaged mess that have slanted all by themselves towards the negative - it's what happens when you roll into a country and toss the government that's been in charge for twenty years without any reasonable plan to end the power vacuum and restore order. What the anti-war crowd wants is for the Bush administration not to fuck this situation up, but it appears to be too late for that. The situation is a mess, it's been handled terribly from every point of view except the military one (I will give them credit - they've done an admirable job when they've had missions to accomplish, the only reason they didn't win the war yet is that the politicians forgot to pin down exactly what "win" would mean in this context, they just thought that things would magically heal themselves and it would be obvious). Yes, America has a badass army that can destroy whatever it wants with very little trouble; unfortunately it also has some mentally challenged leaders that forgot they would need to clean up the mess left by removing an active dictator from a country that's forgotten how to rule itself.
Iraq is no longer a war, after all. A war involves two organized armies having at it, as in with actual commanders and weapons; Iraq is just a bunch of idiots blowing crap up on the roads to scare the people trying to calm things down. We're now trying to quell an insurgency, which is exactly what the anti-war set warned would happen, and warned that we didn't have a plan to deal with. If I recall the response from the Bush administration was that the Iraqis would not do this because they would be so happy to be rid of Saddam. If that had been true, we would have stopped arguing this crap two years ago.
So we're screwed? Should we leave? Who knows...it doesn't appear that things are going very well, which I'm pretty sure even Bush admitted himself, and I really do feel for the Iraqis, so maybe it would be worth sticking it out a little longer to see if we can at least leave things slightly less dangerous than they are now. But as you get yourself all heated up about the anti-war leftist commie shitbag bastards with their patchouli douche and smokable underwear, don't forget this key fact - they were right. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. The entire justification for this war was mistaken, even if it was not an outright lie. Iraq was not even on the radar when it came to being a dire threat to the United States. I know the standard right-wing line from here: Saddam was a bad guy, are you saying it would be better if we left him in power? Well, no, I would never argue the world was better with him, yes, he was a real nasty leader. But there are a lot of bad guys out there. If we start wars with each of their countries just because they're bad guys...well, we just can't, for lack of resources, troops, and morale. There are too many places where we don't like the current leadership, and these kinds of missions do not tend to turn out well, either for our country or theirs. We don't have the energy as a nation to keep reliving the same military regime change nightmare over and over. And the fact is, without the WMD "proof" showing that Saddam was a clear, imminent threat, we would never have gone in because people wouldn't have supported it. Unlike politicians (real or armchair), most real people like to be extremely careful about sending their children off to war, so don't underestimate how totally messed up it is that thousands of our people have now died and killed because of a war that probably shouldn't have started at all.
So whatever...the point of this rant is that the Republicans in control of this war are the ones that messed up - it's ridiculous to point a finger at the media and scream "BIAS!" for reporting on it. You can try to spin this a
Re:War Crimes Clips (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not With My Taxes, Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't be serious.
I guess GIs should not be allowed to have any reading material, and music. No DVDs, either. No recreation time. After all, none of those things are "mission essential." The only thing they should be allowed to read is operations manuals.
Yeah, I'm sure that's going to make for happy troops. It's so great to ask these soldiers to supposedly defend America's freedom, while not allowing them to have any of that freedom. Makes total sense. Won't cause lower morale at all. Will help recruiting efforts immensely.
By this logic, they shouldn't be allowed to write any letters home, either. Do you have some pathological hatred for humanity?
they are still responsible (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your point? (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.econlib.org/library/ENC/PovertyintheUn
The poverty problem is not essentially a money problem. We already spend fortunes of money on poverty programs, have for 40 years, and it's getting worse, not better.
People are not poor solely because they don't have money. There are many factors, and it's a complex problem. I submit to you that there are several things that could be done to dramatically reduce poverty in the US, and few of them require throwing more government-managed dollars at the issue.
The core issues revolve around what people consider to be an acceptable living standard in our culture, and what is "normal."
People who are able to work should work.
People should not borrow money for things that depreciate.
People who don't understand the consequences of borrowing money should not borrow money at all.
People who have no ability to earn an income should not start families.
People who do start families that way should lean predominantly on their family members to help provide food and shelter rather than turning to the government. If you can't pay rent on an apartment, then you should get roommates to help pay the bills. This is common in other cultures. In my neighborhood there are several first-generation immigrant families. Most of them rely on family members and non-family members to help pay the mortgage. To those of us who are not immigrants, this seems unacceptable. Why? Because we're spoiled.
I do have compassion for people, and know that there are some people who just cannot make it on their own. (Mental handicap, physical infirmity, crushing medical bills, etc.)
As I see it, the largest root cause of the poverty problem is
a) People are not willing to get the education that they need to provide the earning opportunities that are needed.
b) If they do have an education, they are unwilling to work hard and consistently to earn money.
c) If they do earn money, they do stupid things with it. e.g. play the lottery, borrow money to buy cars, run credit cards to the limits for crap they don't need, 100% mortgages with interest-only options, and
d) then get overextended, borrowing to their credit limit where they are abused by financial institutions who are driven by shareholders who care about profitability more than whether these companies are abusing people to drive up profits. These mortgages and credit cards should never have been issued in the first place. Those people could not afford to borrow that money.
e) refuse to learn how to develop relationship skills, and they buy into the lie that divorce solves your relational problems. As a result, children are thrown into poverty because the income that was insufficient to cover one household now is split to try to cover expenses for two households.
There are many things we can do to help reduce poverty. Most of them involve getting people to stop living above their means, learn to sacrifice a bit, hold people accountable for bad choices, and teach relational skills so that families are not broken into multiple households. It's not a money problem, it's predominately a character problem, and that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the money being spent in the war on terror.
Respectfully,
Anomaly