NationStates Jolt Archive

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/02/04/web.us/
The Pentagon is running two sites that run regional news for the Balkans and North Africa, and more are on the way. Is this journalism or propaganda?

My personal take is that it is a bit of both: journalism with an agenda, one might say. This is necessary, as this is a new age of warfare. The information dimension has always existed. In wars of yesterday, the advantage was in what one knew. Now that is irrelevant, as it is easy to find out anything. The trick now is how information is interpretted. The US needs media outlets to counter local media, which can be hostile to the US regardless of its actions. Therefore, they need to counter that effectively.

As these sites can be accessed from within the USA they are actually illegal.
The US military is prevented from this kind of activity by law in the USA.

As these sites can be accessed from within the USA they are actually illegal.
The US military is prevented from this kind of activity by law in the USA.
That is debatable. The web has grown so quickly that all of our lawmakers are slow to catch up to it. Thus, we cannot determine the legal status of things posted on the web. I can argue that even if an American audience views it, the military did not intend it, and it is therefore not subject to anti-propaganda laws.
But personally, I find some of those laws silly. I visited both their websites, and even if the information was meant to be propaganda, it is clearly not aimed at a US audience.

Here's one of their sites, btw.
http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/homepage/
They have a disclaimer at the bottom.

Information warfare is one of the most complex subjects our world has to offer. Its psycology, propaganda, theology, applied mathematics and social theory all rolled into one. Its nuanced, subtle, and powerful.

Perhaps that's why I'm so very mistrustful of anyone's attempt to master it; it is pure, untapped potential. Very dangerous stuff indeed. Interesting to see what the Pentagon has been doing with it.

Its also as much Scifi as it is Science right now.

Yes.

Obviously, it's propaganda. What do you think the pledge of allegiance is?

No, I take that back. The government isn't smart enough to come up with a scheme like that.

Well, as no news can ever be fully free of the qualities of propaganda, any news fits the "mix" category. As this is the Pentagon's stuff, there will be more propaganda than normal, but I wouldn't think it would be anything Orwellian.

Pentagon officials say the goal is to counter "misinformation" about the United States in overseas media.
Propaganda.

Information warfare is one of the most complex subjects our world has to offer. Its psycology, propaganda, theology, applied mathematics and social theory all rolled into one. Its nuanced, subtle, and powerful.

Perhaps that's why I'm so very mistrustful of anyone's attempt to master it; it is pure, untapped potential. Very dangerous stuff indeed. Interesting to see what the Pentagon has been doing with it.

Its also as much Scifi as it is Science right now.
I don't blame them for trying to master it. I have faith that they can. The military is undergoing a major transformation right now, and part of that change will require a lot of PR.

Propaganda.
Well, quite a bit of what locals view is "propaganda". Not all of it, or even most of it, but some of it definitly is. Has anyone ever thought that there is al-Qaeda infiltration in al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya? I bet there is. Back in the nineties, al-Qaeda operated a powerful newspaper in the Middle East. Now, most of the stories about the US seem to promote an agenda, and some are uneccessarily harsh. A few even read like rallying calls for our enemies.
Now, al-Jazeera has an English website. It is privately operated, so I would think it'd be a bad business decision. Everyone in the English speaking world is too poor to own a computer, or too suspicious of al-Jazeera to give it much weight. Yet they decided to open an English website. Why? Well, the Qatari government needs to find out. I bet an information specialist from al-Qaeda is in their marketing department. Of course, that is only a hunch.
Because of all of this, I see nothing wrong with the Defense Department's actions. We need to fight fire with fire, but at the very least, the US isn't pretending to be unbiased. It's just doing enough to raise some questions.

A site filled with propaganda and journalism is even worse propaganda than a "pure" propaganda site.

That is debatable. The web has grown so quickly that all of our lawmakers are slow to catch up to it. Thus, we cannot determine the legal status of things posted on the web. I can argue that even if an American audience views it, the military did not intend it, and it is therefore not subject to anti-propaganda laws.
But personally, I find some of those laws silly. I visited both their websites, and even if the information was meant to be propaganda, it is clearly not aimed at a US audience.

If the US had a legal system that considered the intent of the law, then this argument would be fine. (It would certainly work in the UK for example.) However the US legal system does not work that way, it works on the basis of proscriptive laws and the official interpretation of these by the courts.
That the law is outdated, is uncontested, but that the law applies until a federal court decides otherwise, is also uncontestable.

In fairness they aren't exactly hiding the connection. Which limits it's effectivness as a propaganda site. And becaus of the connection, no one would trust its journalism. So it's neither.

Another attempt to flood the news with more government propaganda :)

... it is easy to find out anything.

There are two problems with this statement:

1. If anything, there is too much information, which makes sorting the wheat from the chaff difficult in the extreme. It makes "cherry-picking" into a parlor game.

2. The problem of "who do you believe" is even more critical now since it's become considerably more difficult to find out who is behind what "information." This Forum illustrates the point perfectly, since questionable sources are rife on any side of almost any issue.

One of the few solutions to this proliferation of questionable sources is to check them against "fact-checking" sources you have come to trust over time. Example: Snopes has built a good reputation for being right most of the time when you're trying to verify "internet rumors."

If the US had a legal system that considered the intent of the law, then this argument would be fine. (It would certainly work in the UK for example.) However the US legal system does not work that way, it works on the basis of proscriptive laws and the official interpretation of these by the courts.
That the law is outdated, is uncontested, but that the law applies until a federal court decides otherwise, is also uncontestable.
Well even if that is the case, I doubt anyone will make a serious attempt to enforce it. The US, for example, has a law on the books stating that the official weight and measure system is metric (though I don't know if its been repealed). No one, not even politicians, seem to care that it even exists.

There are two problems with this statement:

1. If anything, there is too much information, which makes sorting the wheat from the chaff difficult in the extreme. It makes "cherry-picking" into a parlor game.

2. The problem of "who do you believe" is even more critical now since it's become considerably more difficult to find out who is behind what "information." This Forum illustrates the point perfectly, since questionable sources are rife on any side of almost any issue.

One of the few solutions to this proliferation of questionable sources is to check them against "fact-checking" sources you have come to trust over time. Example: Snopes has built a good reputation for being right most of the time when you're trying to verify "internet rumors."
These are both problems, but at the very least, it isn't information from just one source that can be controlled. It is from several. I believe that its validity is mostly up to the person reading/hearing it. This isn't perfect, as we risk having everyone having his own version of what really happened. But their were many more problems with the older system.

You know, I was looking through the sites, and I noticed something: both are operated by European Command, or EUCOM. The theater stretches across all of Europe, Africa, and Russia. Both North Africa and the Balkans fall under EUCOM. So is this just their experiment, or is this something larger in the works? I hope its the latter, and that they spread to other theaters, especially the most critical, CENTCOM.

bump

C'mon! No one likes to rip apart the great military-industrial complex that seeks to rule the world? :)