Historical Parallels?

[Hansmeister]

Bill, the problem we face is that we don't have a pro-American media. For evidence I would cite the way the media has covered the passing of the Iraqi Constitution:

The NYTimes: "Many Sunni Arabs voted against the document, but the "no" votes were not enough to defeat it."

LA Times: "Sunni Opponents Unable to Block Iraqi Constitution"

The AP needed 23 paragraphs to finally mention the overwhelming public approval for the Constitution.

How to overcome the desire of the media to see us fail? Develop a stronger voice of our own.

There are many independent journalists and bloggers that do excellent reporting from Iraq. Th Pentagon needs to create a way to collect all that information thru a website, trying to provide content to second-tier media that aren't biased against our efforts.

The Pentagon should also be much more aggressive when dealing with the hostile press. Do'nt be defensive in press conferences. Open up each press conference by pointing out misleading and false articles by the press over the previous day. Force the media into the defensive and to expose their bias. This would shake up the dynamic of the give and take between the media and the Pentagon and somewhat even the playing field.

Basically, the Pentagon has to divide the media into "friendly" and "hostile" camps and vigorously seek to discredit the latter.

The media would go all atwitter over such a policy (just remember their outrage over the "Office of Strategic Influence") and intensify their hostility. However, this would mainly serve only to discredit those media outlets that engage in that strategy since the public would discount their statements as partisan.

[DDilegge]

The passing of the referendum headlines will be butted up against 2,000 mark in GI deaths tomorrow morning.... AP is already running stories about "Iraqi deaths more than U.S." Forget about countering foreign IO - we have our own doing the job for AJ and the BBC.

[Strickland]

The passing of the referendum headlines will be butted up against 2,000 mark in GI deaths tomorrow morning.... AP is already running stories about "Iraqi deaths more than U.S." Forget about countering foreign IO - we have our own doing the job for AJ and the BBC.

I am amazed that we do not attempt to counter the negativity of US media sources through a campaign of context. If we put our 2,000 KIA in the context of events with similar deaths such as Pearl Harbor, D-Day, or September 11th, then maybe people would see this figure with less astonishment. If we further attempted to put this same figure of 2000 KIA in the context of the 16,000 homicides per year that we have in the US, I trust that they would look even less daunting.

[Bill Moore]

Seems a lot of us agree on the media being a significant problem; however, they aren't our only problem. Unfortunately, the bad news they report is largely true. What isn't true is the perspective they put it in. Personally I love a media that challenges our government. Can you imagine our government if we didn't have the media as part of the check and balance system? Within reason professional members of our media are as essential to protecting our freedoms as we grunts are.

I'll jump off my soapbox now, but I wanted to set the stage for the remainder of my reply. Why does the popular media's version of the story sell, and the Pentagon's version of the story flop? We have an unsosphisticated spin machine in the Pentagon that couldn't sell bottled water to a person isolated in the desert. On the other hand we have a public media that seeks out bad news, and presents it in a very dramatic and unbalanced manner. I don't think they want to see us lose (some do, but they're out of the norm), they simply think they're doing the right thing.

Paraphrasing something I heard Mr. Rober Kaplan (author numerous articles and books, most recently Imperial Grunts), "you can't paint images of plastic saints, and expect them to be credible". I think it was an attempt at an apology perhaps because he tells his readers about our heroic exploits and about the warts on our butt. He's right! Our pentagon news services like to put out these clean, just too happy, just too feel good stories that wouldn't convince a second grader that the story was true.

I don't think we counter the bad news by ignoring it, or rushing to put it out, then hoping it will go away. We have to admit our challenges, we definitely have challenges in Iraq and elsewhere beyond the media. I guess I'm kind of weird in the fact that I believe that the American people have a good sense for the truth when they hear it.

Imagine if we had real people speaking to the press at the Pentagon and in the field, that didn't have a story to tell, but rather discussed the issues, the challenges we're facing and where we're making progress. Not some perfumed prince getting in front of the spot light to give his five minutes of sound bites, then leaving the press to analyze it. Why aren't we analyzing it with them?

The saying that the truth is the first casualty of war appears to have a long history, but what is different now (from the recent past) is the number of sources that information seekers can go to to seek the truth. We can't operate the way we used to and simply put out a simple spin message and expect it to sell. We have to get in the mud and speak from there, and tell the American people how we're transforming this mud pit we're in. Stop trying to create unrealistic expectations, stop giving time lines, and simply tell the truth (where we can). The truth sells too, not just bad news, but the truth must be perceived as the truth to sell. Sometimes I think the harder we try to counter the bad news, the worse we look. We should tell the bad news, then tell the rest of the story and put it in perspective. If we don't address it someone else will.

[DDilegge]

I am amazed that we do not attempt to counter the negativity of US media sources through a campaign of context. If we put our 2,000 KIA in the context of events with similar deaths such as Pearl Harbor, D-Day, or September 11th, then maybe people would see this figure with less astonishment. If we further attempted to put this same figure of 2000 KIA in the context of the 16,000 homicides per year that we have in the US, I trust that they would look even less daunting.

2,000 Dead, in Context - 27 Oct. Op-Ed by Victor Davis Hanson in the NYT:

"...Comparative historical arguments, too, are not much welcome in making sense of the tragic military deaths - any more than citing the tens of thousands Americans who perish in traffic accidents each year. And few care to hear that the penultimate battles of a war are often the costliest - like the terrible summer of 1864 that nearly ruined the Army of the Potomac and almost ushered in a Copperhead government eager to stop at any cost the Civil War, without either ending slavery or restoring the Union. The battle for Okinawa was an abject bloodbath that took more than 50,000 American casualties, yet that campaign officially ended less than six weeks before Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender..."