Citizen Soldier/Citizen Journalist

Bruce Kesler from The Democracy Project has an outstanding post up about the rise of Milbloggers - and the failure of the MSM to grasp what that means. Media establishments continue to look down their noses at the citizen journalists who understand the subject matter of the military far better than the media "experts". But they do so at their own peril.

For an earlier generation of now middle-aged Vietnam servicepeople, whose voices largely went unheard and whose reputations were tarred by major media echoing of Kerryesque fabrications, the rise of the milbloggers is cheered, and many are now getting their voice heard.

The condescension toward milbloggers oozes from the head of establishment journalism’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, for whom the truth is his fellows’ “big picture,” rather than piecing together a better picture from the individual shards of first-hand facts:

If the overall picture is one of continued violence and a significant lack of stability in many parts of Iraq, the individual shards of good news could be more of a distortion than a reflection of the truth.

The former managing editor of American Journalism Review, another major center for establishment journalism, exhibits this failure to gather all the facts, in her AJR article reporting on the mainstream reporters of the Haditha incident. Near the end of her long piece, she does get to the core of the problem, but ends on the MSM’s note of agreement with their “big picture”:

Coverage of these incidents is only going to increase as the cases go to trial, presenting a challenge for the press to provide fair and contextual reporting.
Galloway [Joe Galloway, recently retired military affairs correspondent fro Knight Ridder] and others point out that mistakes and abuses happen in every armed conflict. "The slaughter of innocents, accidental and deliberate, has occurred in every war man has ever fought," Galloway wrote in a June 7 column. "It's especially true in the wars of insurgency."
I asked Galloway if he has seen that kind of context, a more realistic picture of war, in coverage of Haditha. "I can't say that I have," he answered.
Human Rights Watch's Sifton says that the media should be looking at systemic problems, the bigger picture, not simply "incident, incident, incident." He adds, "I don't think Haditha coverage alone is a good thing."

Read the whole thing - it's well worth the time.