Sorry, still haven't figured out how to make that "quote" function do what I want it to do. I want to reply to the issue you raise that there is a concern or a perception, "are we even fighting?" I couldn't agree more, and in work I've done over the last few years I've made the exact same argument: the nature of the press coverage gives the impression that our troops are in a completely passive posture, at best that they spend their time driving from one end of Iraq to the other, waiting to be blown up by IEDs.

I argue that what causes that is in large part the narrative-free presentation of casualty figures, night after night after night, this sense that there's just this drip, drip, drip of casualties, (particularly since on nights where the networks don't focus on Iraq -- and there are many such nights -- they feel the one thing they must report is the casualties), where all that gets reported is, number of deaths, Army or Marines, perhaps the province where the troops died, and sometimes the type of weapon that caused their deaths ("roadside bomb," "IED attack," "RPG attack," and almost never, "firefight.")

Now, to be clear, this is not entirely the fault of the press. The military has made two choices that contribute to this. The first is to avoid, almost always, reporting on enemy casualties. That, to be sure, is to avoid a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" phenomena -- the desire to avoid all the heat that comes along with the perception that they are using "body counts" as the metric for success. Fair enough, but the result is that there's also a perception created that it's only our side that's taking the hits, and only their side that's taking an active stance. The second choice is to release as little information regarding battlefield casualties as possible.

As I understand it, one reason for this is because information provided immediately afterwards also provides the enemy something they can't get otherwise: BDA. Fair enough, but as I've argued here in other contexts, understand that isn't a cost-free choice. Perhaps there's a way to balance that, to reduce the risk of providing useful information while giving something, something that suggests what it was our troops were doing when they fell. It is a myth, the research makes clear, that the American public will not accept battlefield casualties, but what they will not accept is casualties they do not believe were justified. (See the work of my colleagues at the tri-university research consortium down here on this point:
http://www.amazon.com/Choosing-Your-...8753977&sr=8-3

But if there is no narrative, no explanation, then by definition there is no justification, yes?

The other reason the military hesitates in giving out information is because, given the high risk early reports will be incorrect, there is a fear that later corrections will be misinterpreted or misunderstood. I understand that but, again, withholding all information is not a cost-free choice. Surely there is a middle road, such as waiting several days and then releasing some information.

Now, Goesh's suggestion is that one possible answer to all this is to simply show the proof that our troops are active, in the form of visual evidence. I respectfully disagree. That, I believe, would backfire. Think about how rarely you see images of dead bodies on the news (you see foreign dead more often than American dead, but even those are not a regular occurance.) This is a particularly American phenomenon -- the Canadians show a bit more than we do, the Brits a bit more than the Canadians, (I don't know anything about the Aussies), but the rest of the world just doesn't have this sense that viewing the dead is in some way being disrespectful of the dead.

Without babbling on too much longer and boring you any more than I probably already have, some have argued that this is a "sanitization" of war coverage, done for ideological reasons. That's just wrong. Watch the local news in any market in the United States: a staple item will be car accidents, and you just will not see dead bodies, period. You see images that are proxies of death -- shoes by the side of the road, teddy bears by the side of the road, maybe the crumpled car. The thing is, the news outlets make this judgment partially out of their own belief, but partly because they know what reaction they get from their audiences when they cross particular lines. They'll do it for images they think are particularly newsworthy (the Mogadishu pictures, for ex) but they'd better be damn newsworthy.

The kind of images you're talking about will not be well received, at all. In fact most people will have a violent negative reaction to them, and given that you're talking about a work-around to the mainstream media, a la YouTube, I just don't think it will work.

Let me apologize for the long-windedness of this post, but you raise an important and complicated point. I don't have a good answer (yet), but it's something I've been fussing over (like a loose tooth) for some time. In point of fact it's been annoying the crap out of me that I don't have a good answer to all this, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful.
Cori