The Neo Con Blogger has a fascinating email from last week’s retired General and Flag Officers’ Conference in Fort Carson, Colorado. The email as a whole summarizes the collective judgment of a panel of several Army field commanders, most with operational experience in either Iraq or Afghanistan. While their analysis as a whole makes for choice reading, I was particularly drawn to their thoughts on the public affairs war, commentary which I believe underscores the importance of milblogs.
Public Affairs: We are losing the public affairs battle for a variety of reasons. First, in Iraq, the terrorists provide Al Jazeera with footage of their more spectacular attacks and they are on TV to the whole Arab world within minutes of the event. By contrast it takes four to six days for a story generated by Army Public Affairs to gain clearance by Combined Forces Command, two or three more days to get Pentagon clearance, and after all that, the public media may or may not run the story.Second, the U.S. mainstream media (MSM) who send reporters to the combat zone do not like to have their people embedded with our troops. They claim that the reporters get “less objective” when they live with the soldiers and marines – they come to see the world through the eyes of the troops. As a consequence, a majority of the reporters stay in hotels in the “Green Zone” and send out native stringers to call in stories to them by cell phone which they later write up and file. No effort is made to verify any of these stories or the credibility of the stringers. The recent serious injuries to Bob Woodruff of ABC and Kimberly Dozier of CBS makes the likelihood of the use of local stringers even higher.
Third, the stories that are filed by reporters in the field very seldom reach the American public as written. An anecdote from Col. McMaster illustrates this dramatically. TIME magazine recently sent a reporter to spend six weeks with the 3rd ACR as they were in the battle of Tal Afar. When the battle was over, the reporter filed his story and also included close to 100 pictures that the accompanying photographer took. TIME published a cover story on the battle a week later, allegedly using the story sent in by their reporter. When the issue came out, the guts had been edited out of their reporter’s story and none of the pictures he submitted were used. Instead they showed a weeping child on the cover, taken from stock photos. When the reporter questioned why his story was eviscerated, his editors in New York responded that the story and pi ctures were “too heroic”. McMaster had read both and told me that the editors had completely changed the thrust and context of the material their reporter had submitted.
As a sidebar on the public affairs situation, Colonel Bob McRee, who was also on the panel and is bringing a Military Police Battalion to Iraq next month, invited the Colorado Springs Gazette to send a reporter with the battalion for six weeks to two months. He assured the Gazette, in writing one month ago, that he would provide full time bodyguards for the reporter, taking the manpower out of his own hide. The Gazette has yet to respond to his offer.
The Flag and General Officers Conference is the largest single gathering of retired military leadership in the country. If the overall attitude of both the panelists and participants is indicative of the retired military community as a whole, it seems to disprove contentions from the mainstream media that the majority of retired generals are opponents of the current Iraq policy.
Keep up the good work and keep speaking out and keep us posted on the reality ‘over there’. I think a slow burning back-lash is starting to develop against the media that only wants to portray the negative and make the US look bad. The Senate, 93-6, shut down a move to have troops withdrawn by years end. That pretty much sums it up.
John,
Good pull…I was going over that email with a buddy of mine down here at Fort Meade just the other day.
Here’re some of my issues.
We’ve mistakenly called this the “Public Affairs Battle”. This completely frames the wrong issue. What is the “Public Affairs Battle”? The way it’s currently framed it makes several assumptions.
1- If we fight the battle the right way, people will overwhelmingly support the war in Iraq. This is very similar to the old PR theory of “if you only knew what we knew, you’d agree with us. There is no room in this theory for people who know what we know, but still decide to be against the war. In other words, we can never agree to disagree.
2- By calling it the PA battle, we put the onus for winning on public affairs professionals. Combine this with number one above, and you get a situation where I, as a PAO, am now responsible for whether or not the public supports the war.
3- If the military is guilty of not engaging the media quickly enough on certain stories (and we are), it ain’t the fault of PAOs. I completely agree with the comment:
By contrast it takes four to six days for a story generated by Army Public Affairs to gain clearance by Combined Forces Command, two or three more days to get Pentagon clearance, and after all that, the public media may or may not run the story.
But notice that Army public affairs is generating the story…where does it go from there? It ultimately has to be approved by a ton of non-PAO types. That’s where our problem is.
Imagine an infantry commander having to clear fires for every single instance in which someone in his company fires a weapon in Iraq…you can see where that leads.
We’re not fighting a public affairs battle. We’re fighting the same battle that is always fought with the media: a battle with the self-appointed gatekeepers of news. It’s a battle with those who have decided what the news is and isn’t, and who won’t have it any other way.
Unfortunately, we can’t simply fight the battle with our own stories and our own web sites. This is why we need to reach out faster to other, non-traditional media, such as bloggers. We need to be less sensitive to those blogs or comments by servicemembers that are rough…and not completely lose our minds every time a soldier says, “I fucking hate it here”.
And we need to release some authority down the chain to engage the media … especially in an era where we have embedded media that we don’t control and through whom we don’t clear information. How is it that we will allow an embedded reporter who might write anything at all, but if we want to say it, it has to be cleared all the way back to the Pentagon for relatively minor things?
Finally, we need to change the way we train our future leaders to deal with the media, and do away with “ambush style” interview training. I’m blogging a little more in depth on that last issue later.
That’s it for now.
Take care,
Mike
How is it that we will allow an embedded reporter who might write anything at all, but if we want to say it, it has to be cleared all the way back to the Pentagon for relatively minor things?
I suspect you already know the answer to that question, sir.
Politics.
Risk aversion at the G.O.-level.
Fear of career-killing blowback. There is a network of Democratic Party operatives, Soros-funded foundation policy wonks, and leftist media whores just waiting to make a federal case out of some Marine playing the guitar on YouTube.
Slightly less than half of your political masters oppose the war, were spitting on returnees from Vietnam 37 years ago, hate your Commander-in-Chief and will do anything to undermine him, to including hanging your chain of command out to dry. And the worst thing about it is that they may be back in power soon.
I have a new piece that is just as good as the Flag Officer Conference. Come see it!