Bloggers, Money U.S. Weapons in Information War

26 Dec Washington Post - Bloggers, Money U.S. Weapons in Information War.

Quote:

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Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

Frustrated by the coverage they were receiving from the news media, the Marines invited Roggio, 35, who writes a popular Web log about the military called The Fourth Rail ( http://www.billroggio.com ), to come cover the war from the front lines.

"He raised more than $30,000 from his online readers to pay for airfare, technical equipment and body armor. A few weeks later, he was posting dispatches from a remote outpost in western Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq's insurgency.

I was disenchanted with the reporting on the war in Iraq and the greater war on terror and felt there was much to the conflict that was missed," Roggio wrote in an e-mail response to written questions. What is often seen as an attempt at balanced reporting results in underreporting of the military's success and strategy and an overemphasis on the strategically minor success of the jihadists or insurgents.

Roggio's arrival in Iraq comes amid what military commanders and analysts say is an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information about the conflict. Scrutiny of what the Pentagon calls information operations heightened late last month, when news reports revealed that the U.S. military was paying Iraqi journalists and news organizations to publish favorable stories written by soldiers, sometimes without disclosing the military's role in producing them...

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Bill Roggio has responded to the article itself, refuting most of its allegations in its entirety, in particularly that he is being paid by the military to participate in the "information war". Sounds just like another desperate attempt by the MSM to marginalize any voice that disagrees with their doom and gloom reporting.