Quote:
Originally Posted by marct
In a lot of ways, I suspect that there will always be friction in democracies between the military and the media, just from their varying social roles. More and more, I am seeing this project as a way to find out where the "flash points" are between the two, which of them can be mitigated and which ones can't.
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Keep in mind, there's a vast literature on the history of media-military relations. While in general you're correct, the institutions are going to be tugging at one another to some extent b/c of the nature of the institutions' roles, a relationship that had gone south after Vietnam really seemed to be healed to a lot of people with the institution of the embed program during the combat phase. Over the last four years the wheels have once again come off the wagon, and -- tragically, I'd argue -- the relationship looked at big picture has once again soured.
Now, this isn't just true from the military side. The military as an institution (NOT individual soldiers or units) has seen its credibility with the press badly eroded over the last four years. (And, again, speaking as someone who has been and continues to be a very, very harsh critic of the press, things are not going to be entirely resolved unless the military comes to grips with the fact that there are some legitimate reasons for that to have happened.)
As much as I think the idea of going after a cross-country study makes real sense, I think a major contribution would come from a study that also went after the perceptions of newsies who covered the war in a serious way. The primary difficulty, because organizations (one of the main problems in the coverage, IMHO) have often rotated so many people in for a turn or two who didn't have the background and were just there as sort of "relief pitchers" would be coming up with a careful definition of who's perceptions mattered, who you wanted to define in and who you wanted to define out among the journalists.
For ex, I think there is a very serious, highly professionalized, Pentagon press corps. They cover a different slant of story than the folks actually in Baghdad do. But their perception of the military obviously matters. In or out? Some of the folks in Baghdad have been there for a very long time, or at least have done multiple tours there, but they're more foreign affairs folks than military beat/war correspondents. In or out? What about people who have nothing to do with covering war or the military typically but got sent in because no one else at their network was willing to go and SOMEBODY had to go in to give the Baghdad guy a break? And so on and so forth.
But if you want to get at that idea of flash points, and in partiicular if you're looking for which ones are institutional and which ones are context-driven, coming out of behaviors/events that took place during this war and could be changed, I think you need to survey both "sides."
The argument I make in my work is that there are some aspects of covering this war that are unique, that caught everyone off guard, but which aren't going away, and which therefore have to be grappled with. This would be another way of coming at that.
The other thing is this: I've been a little concerned about how the resulting data might be seen, or used. The environment is now so charged, it's an issue you have to take into account. If you survey both, the findings can be presented exactly as MarkT phrased it above: a critical relationship has become unhealthy, this research is a step towards discovering why, and that's a necessary step towards discovering what can be done to heal that relationship.
Attitudes twards the media
) in coming in on this one. I will be in contact with you.
) when an American journalist that I've know for a while came in.
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