Tag Archives: media

War is boring

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David Axe is a military correspondent, as he is introduced in the website he shares with some other people. This website is called War is Boring.

This website is interesting. In it, Axe and others post their own stories, pictures, drawings and videos from conflict zones. This is part of their mission statement:

We are citizen journalists with a deep interest in world and national security. We are opposed to violence but recognize the necessity and utility of war. We advocate diplomacy and compromise over force as a solution to conflict.

We are wary of partisan politics, skeptical of the military-industrial-media complex, calm in the face of extremists’ rhetoric and adamant that open debate almost always trumps secrecy.

We lament the passing of old media but embrace the emergence of New Media. As journalists, we abide by three simple rules:

* Be accurate
* Be honest
* As often as possible, observe first-hand

We are expeditionary, investing our own resources and those donated to us, in order to travel to current and emerging conflict zones.

(…)

I would add ‘Be transparent’ to those “simple rules”. Be transparent to both your sources and readers (viewers, whatever). Or at least be as transparent as you can be given the circumstances of the situation. But anyway, cool enough.

In 2006, Axe published a “graphic novel war memoir” called War Fix, drawn by Steve Olexa. And now he is publishing another graphic novel, this one called too War is Boring and illustrated by Matt Bors. This second one is a more personal account of his life as a conflict reporter for four years. During that time, Axe reported from East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Chad and a few other places.

It looks at least interesting, as the comic offers different possibilities than more traditional media to tell war stories (not that this is the first ‘war comic’ ever, but anyway).

He published this new book this month and so he’s giving interviews and stuff. Yesterday, Noah Shachtman posted an article about it in Wired’s Danger Room (DR). Axe has written for Wired, he and Shachtman are friends and this article is mostly made up of an email exchange between them. This offers a revealing -if short- insight into this guy’s experiences and is worth to read. I’m highlighting this for you to go there and read it in full:

DR: You’ve covered just about every war on the planet. Why don’t you like being called a war correspondent?

DA: (…) So I’m not a war correspondent in the truest sense of the word. I’m something else. I like to use the term “conflict reporter,” since I spend 2/3 of my time sitting on my ass in Columbia, S.C., writing about war and technology from a distance, rather than “corresponding” from the battlefield.

(…)

DR: You wrote that you started covering war zones, in part, to make you “smarter, sexier, and happier.” How’d that turn out?

DA: Not at all. I brought back one serious skin condition from Iraq and another from Africa. Two bouts of dysentery in Iraq mean I now have trouble digesting many foods. I can be rather volatile and depressive these days. I don’t always make for pleasant company.

I said this is revealing because I find it’s not the usual image most people may have of a war or conflict reporter. What do you think about this?

Warning: Bad journalism inside

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We journalists, newspapers and the media in general don’t respect the reader anymore. We just write and publish the stupidest stories and don’t give a shit about it. Sourcing the information? Ugh, too much work. Linking to the original source when writing online? I feel too lazy. Double-checking the data? Who do you think I am, a serious scientist? We shouldn’t just copy and paste press releases as news? Oh, but it’s so quick and easy and it looks like real news. We shouldn’t publish unverified claims as facts? What, do you want me to actually do some work and find out…?

I find, via Bad Science‘s @bengoldacre, these journalism label warnings by Tom Scott (who has other cool stuff too, funny guy).

They are just brilliant. Do visit the webpage and check them out because they are excellent.

Shit, Wikipedia is unverified? (Photo: Tom Scott)

Shit, Wikipedia is unverified? (Photo: Tom Scott)

Other warnings, but not all, are:

  • Statistics, survery results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company.
  • This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.
  • Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.
  • To ensure future interviews with subject, important questions were not asked.

Imagine there was something like a ‘Respecting the Reader Service’. It would be in charge of posting these warnings in the many suitable articles just before the papers go to the newsdesk. Oh man. I think that would bring many journalists down a peg or two and bakeries would run out of humble pie.

Go and read them and tell me what you think: Is it more appropriate to laugh or to cry at this? I vote for laughing.

Y si hablas español, te aburres, tienes tiempo libre y no eres tan vago como yo, por favor, haz algo parecido en nuestro idioma :-)

Is WikiLeaks’ Afghan diary “a bad precedent for the Internet’s future”?

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Reporters Without Borders (RSF, in French) today published an open letter to Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, its spokesperson and recent worldwide media and internet celebrity. In it, RSF openly criticises him and WikiLeaks about the publication of the ‘Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010‘. WikiLeaks presented this as a “compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010″. And it has its own website: Kabul War Diary.

This ‘diary’ was published by WikiLeaks last 26 July. But prior to this, WikiLeaks worked with the Guardian, the New York Times and the Spiegel, all of which published online and one day before their particular more journalistic version of the big leak.

On the same 26 July, the White House condemned the leak and accused WikiLeaks “of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America’s national security of the US“.

And a few days later, some US officials went personally for Assange and admiral Mike Mullen graphically said WikiLeaks could already have blood on their hands:

Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.

And then Assange defended WikiLeaks’ action and said it was the US itself that might have failed to its sources:

We are appalled that the US military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled. We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities.

…

This material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan… It’s the US military that deserves the blame for not giving due diligence to its informers.

The debate went and goes on and one can only imagine how excited some journalism students -and how bored some others- may be while discussing the whole thing and drinking at the Queen Boadicea.

And now here it comes RSF joining the criticism. It’s an interesting text in itself and the arguments are mostly pragmatic and involve the security of the sources.

RSF begins its letter by saying the WikiLeaks’ logs disclosed “the names of Afghans who have provided information to the international military coalition that has been in Afghanistan since 2001″. Later it goes on and says that “revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks“.

Now, I don’t know if it’s that easy to identify the informants mentioned in the logs, so I’ll leave that point aside.

Then RSF offers a pragmatic argument about the consequences for the internet in democratic countries:

We are not convinced that your wish to “end the war in Afghanistan” will be so easily granted and meanwhile, you have unintentionally provided supposedly democratic governments with good grounds for putting the Internet under closer surveillance.

This is an interesting point for anybody publishing stuff in the internet. Should you not publish something that is worth knowing because democratic governments could find it uncomfortable and could put the internet under close surveillance? Mmm, that’s a difficult one. Or is it? I would go ahead and publish it. Then it’s up to the government. One can argue how much any particular information is worth knowing and if this outweighs the risk of the government then increasing internet surveillance – but that’s missing the point. I think the point is: are you responsible for the government’s move after your publication? I do not think so, not even considered from a purely pragmatic point of view. Also, doing otherwise and not publishing it would mean there is a red line you don’t want to cross and that, effectively, the possibility of the government knowing did stop you from publishing something. Which is bad.

Then, in my opinion, RSF goes to a key point:

Nonetheless, indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility. Journalistic work involves the selection of information. The argument with which you defend yourself, namely that Wikileaks is not made up of journalists, is not convincing. Wikileaks is an information outlet and, as such, is subject to the same rules of publishing responsibility as any other media.

I think the arguments Assange uses to defend himself and WikiLeaks are much more complex than only that. After all, Julian is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. (Ups, there it goes, I didn’t want to say I know him but couldn’t help it.) Anyway. The main point is what I made in bold. I agree with it: anybody or anything that publishes information should be held to the same rules of “publishing responsibility” as any other person or organisation that also publishes stuff. What takes me back to the former point. I don’t think anybody should not publish something fearing the government’s reaction might be to increase the surveillance of the internet (which anyway governments try already to do).

Then RSF says Assange and WikiLeaks “cannot claim to enjoy the protection of sources while at the same time, when it suits you, denying that you are a news media”. Again, I think RSF misses the point. WikiLeaks does protect the identity of their sources. If we are to believe them, they say they even avoid knowing who their sources are and so they couldn’t reveal them even if they wanted to.

And finally, RSF makes the judgement:

The precedent you have set leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals. Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium.

What? The Afghan informants who may be in danger didn’t become informants “for the sake of online information”. They did because they thought they were doing the right thing or because the US army paid them or whatever the reason. They probably didn’t think their information would end up freely available in the internet. And they were the US army’s sources. Apart from that, how does this whole thing actually affect whoever risks her freedom or her life for the sake of online information? I don’t think risking your freedom or your life for the sake of online information has become riskier, or less risky, because of this whole issue. In the occasions when it’s dangerous, wherever every time it happens to be, I think it remains as much as it was before.

And about the second point in that paragraph. This hasn’t endangered WikiLeaks’ sources. If Bradley Manning is a source of WikiLeaks’, as funny as the story looks like, then it was he who got himself into trouble by confessing to Lamo. Nothing to see with WikiLeaks. If it wasn’t him, nothing has happened to any source of WikiLeaks’ as far as we know. And I can’t see how the Afghan logs could endanger those who already are WikiLeaks’s sources or those who may become so in the future.

So I don’t really see the point of this letter – apart from the argument that I left aside: whether the publication of the logs does endanger the Afghan informants’ lives or not. Again, I don’t know enough about that issue to really discuss it. But I don’t think this very issue is one for RSF to send an open letter to Assange. I think it’s not the stuff RSF usually deals with or criticises people or organisations for.

But I think the more journalistic and media-related arguments RSF makes, about protecting the sources and being careful about not annoying the government, are mostly bullshit. Why did they say all this?

Anyway, an idea comes to my mind about the whole informants thing. If, as Assange claimed, “this material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan”, and if it’s that easy to identify informants in the text, then maybe whoever wrote the logs should’ve been more careful when mentioning the sources? Then maybe there should be different rules in place when writing these logs to protect the informants’ identities? Or maybe not, I don’t know.

WikiLeaks and the ‘Afghan diary’ may or may not be bad for a number of reasons and Julian Assange may be becoming too much of a celebrity himself. But, as much as I respect RSF, I think this letter is mostly bullshit. Even though, now that I think about it and to be honest, I don’t know that much about RSF. But anyway, I don’t understand why they wrote this letter and what they are actually after with it. We’ll see what Assange replies if he does.

I’m meeting some friends for dinner and cocktails and I’m already late. And so I wrote this very quickly and I’m sure I made mistakes and I hope I said outrageous things. Or maybe it’s not RSF but me who is missing the points here. And I could even be wrong about something, even if such a thing doesn’t usually happen to me. So c’mon, say it, point those things out in the comments and let’s begin an interesting debate for the first time in the history of this blog.

(All the bolding in the quotes is mine.)