Washington Times - YouTube circulates 'unfiltered' war views

[jonSlack]

Washington Times - YouTube Diaries Circulate 'Unfiltered' Views Of War

The hardest thing in the world is to leav someone behind for six months, Senior Aircraftman Paul Goodfellow tells a hand-held camera as he crouches in what looks like a bathroom.

"It's not just saying bye for six months," the young member of Britain's Royal Air Force Regiment says on his way to Afghanistan in April 2007. "There's always the thought that maybe I might not come back and maybe we might not see each other again."

Mr. Goodfellow bade farewell to his girlfriend on a beach in South Shields, England, but was keeping in touch with loved ones - and the rest of the world - through a series of daily video diaries on YouTube during his deployment with the No. 51 Squadron in Kandahar province.

The clips gave viewers candid glimpses into the daily life of an RAF gunner. He spoke about his feelings and captured the everyday details of being in the military, such as weapons drills or going on patrol. He shared insights into the people and landscapes around him.

The article reports on the use of YouTube by both individual service members as well as MNFI; nothing earth shattering in that respect. However, what startled me were the comments from a journalism professor at the University of Pennsylvania that I have emphasized below.

One video posted on the YouTube channel for the Multi-National Force in Iraq shows a night raid by members of the Iraqi Security Force in Kirkuk. The group was responding to citizens' tips about the location of an 11-year-old boy being held hostage by a kidnapping cell that was demanding a $100,000 ransom from his father, who works as a mechanic.

The language spoken in the video is Arabic, but the sequence of events is not difficult to understand. The Iraqi soldiers rub the boy's head after rescuing him from his captors and give him a cell phone to call his parents. The clip ends with women crying for joy as they run to him in the night.

Comments on the video, which has been viewed in full more than 8,000 times, are emotive.

"The military is the greatest group of people on the planet, plain and simple," wrote one viewer. Another added: "but this won't make the news."

It's not realistic to expect the mainstream media to devote time to human-interest stories when "the majority [of war] is about violence," said Barbie Zelizer, a journalism professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

"I think it's media's responsibility to reflect the bulk, kind of the core of what's going on," she said of the mainstream media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's not that the media are biased; it's the public isn't particularly supportive of this war so why should the media go and find the one or two videos on YouTube and give them coverage because they give a human aspect?"

Because "the majority [of war] is about violence" does that mean if the child had been killed it would be newsworthy?

Secondly, I cannot understand how one can dismiss the MNFI video as a mere “human interest story.” While I have not watched the video in question, the description provided in the article makes it clear that it shows more than just the rescue of a kidnapped child. It demonstrates the level of progress that an Iraqi unit has achieved in conducting successful operations. And, more importantly, it shows that the local population trusts that Iraqi unit enough to provide it with valuable information.

Finally, I thought the media was charged with discovering and reporting what is actually happening in the world regardless of whether or not it is popular. Is the University of Pennsylvania actually teaching journalism students that it is acceptable not to report something because the “the public isn't particularly supportive” of it?