During what some have called the 'most televised war in history, ' did journalistic objectivity fall by the wayside? Were the experiences of embedded journalists in Iraq markedly different from reporters who went on their own? Reporting from the Front is a provocative look at media and the Iraq War-spanning issues from basic reporting and coverage to ethical dilemmas, personal safety, and training with the military. Featuring interviews with journalists such as Anne Garrels and Ivan Watson of NPR and Bob Schieffer and Byron Pitts of CBS, among others, Reporting from the Front offers personal insights from a wide range of correspondents, producers, editors, photojournalists, media managers, and military and defense officials about reporting on Iraq as well as on previous wars and other conflicts

The first comprehensive study of the contentious issue of the public's right to know in time of war or limited conflict. The book traces the uneasy relations between the military and a generally unprepared and gullible media, from the Crimea to the present day. It shows how the advent of nuclear warfare has outlawed the nationalistic wars of survival of the past, and freed the citizen from his age-old obligations in time of war, able to make up his or her own mind on the merits of the situation. It is here that the battle lies, in the struggle for public opinion as a necessary precursor to war. This book details how the military discovered the secret of media and public manipulation in the Falklands, tested it in Grenada, and refined it in Panama before deploying it in all its glory during the Gulf. This book is essential reading for every soldier and journalist, or any student of military history as it points the way to the future.

Søgeord: Military and Media; Militæret og Medierne; Misinformation; TV; Royal Navy; RAF; News; Press; Objektivitet; Defence Public Relations Service; Censorship; BBC; British Army; Journalisme; Public Opinion; Iranian Embassy Siege; Ulster; Krigsreportage;

Social media has fundamentally changed communication and interaction in today's society. Apart from being used by individuals, it is also omnipresent in public sector organisations such as the armed forces. This book examines the opportunities and risks associated with social media in the context of the armed forces from an international, social scientific perspective. It discuses the impact of social media in the everyday life of military personnel and analyses the extent to which social media influences their performance, be it as a distraction or as a source of perceived appreciation. It particularly highlights the representation of masculinity and femininity in military social media channels, since the way gender is portrayed on social media has an effect on how future recruits and – at the other end of the military career spectrum – veterans feel they are approached. The book also focuses on the new form of follow-up discussion, which enables the armed forces to interact with the population. On social media, the armed forces are publicly presented, and this shapes the public’s opinions on them. Further, the armed forces can use debates as a monitoring tool of society's attitudes towards them or towards events that have an effect on society. Conversely, social media can lend a voice to military personnel, allowing them to be publicly heard. As discussions on social media can only be controlled to a limited extent, the context in which the armed forces are discussed alters their sphere of influence and potentially leads to a loss of control. An extreme example of this is the use of social media as a tool to strategically distribute misinformation in order to shape public opinion and threaten national security. Moreover, the use of social media to demoralise adversaries or to harm their credibility results in social media being considered a cyber weapon that affects politics and military activities.

Over the course of the next six months, the Strategic Studies Institute will examine the impact of the media's technological advances on strategic and operational level planning and policymaking, first in an overseas theater, and subsequently on decisions made at the national level. The first of these two studies recognizes the complexity of executing military operations under the scrutiny of a very responsive, high technology world news media. Given the volatile, unstable, and ambiguous environment in which armed forces can find themselves, the actions of field forces have a greater chance than ever before of affecting subsequent strategic decisions made at higher levels. The pressure on field commanders to "get it right the first time" is demonstrably greater than ever. The author intends that these thoughts provide commanders with an understanding of the high technology and competitive news media environment they can expect to experience and offers specific suggestions for successfully communicating with reporters.

This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Surveys the U.S. Army¿s approach to media relations from the Spanish-American War to the first Gulf War. The relationship between the Army and the media is considered in the broader context of the U.S. Government¿s approach to info. mgmt. (IM) Here is an overview of how the U.S. Army has approached its relations with the media over the previous century. Since World War I a number of bureaucratic manifestations of IM have been tried in wartime. With the exception of the U.S. Info. Agency, whose tenure spanned the period from 1953 to 1999, all the other manifestations of bureaucratic IM rose and fell during the wars in which they were created. The need for units in the field to participate in IM is a major challenge for future operations. Illus.

This is the first academic analysis of the role of embedded media in the 2003 Iraq War, providing a concise history of US military public affairs management since Vietnam. In late summer 2002, the Pentagon considered giving the press an inside view of the upcoming invasion of Iraq. The decision was surprising, and the innovative "embedded media program" itself received intense coverage in the media. Its critics argued that the program was simply a new and sophisticated form of propaganda. Their implicit assumption was that the Pentagon had become better at its news management and had learned to co-opt the media. This new book tests this assumption, introducing a model of organizational learning and redraws the US military’s cumbersome learning curve in public affairs from Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans to Afghanistan, examining whether past lessons were implemented in Iraq in 2003. Thomas Rid argues that while the US armed forces have improved their press operations, America’s military is still one step behind fast-learning and media-savvy global terrorist organizations. War and Media Operationswill be of great interest to students of the Iraq War, media and war, propaganda, political communications and military studies in general.

This book is the first about military-media relations to argue for a fundamental restructuring of national journalism and the first to document the failure of American journalism in the national security field for the past thirty years. Press complaints of excessive control by the military during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 were the inevitable result of the failure of American journalism to train competent specialists in military reporting and to provide an organizational structure that would assure continuing, comprehensive coverage of national defense in peace and war. This, in turn, is the result of retaining the city-room concept as the basic organizational feature of the press, with continuing reliance on the generalist in an age that demands increasingly well-trained specialists. So long as the press fails to modernize its basic methods of training to assure well-trained defense specialists, the military will be required to closely control reporters, as in the Persian Gulf War, as a basic requirement of security for armed forces members and the national interests. Permitting the military to control how the military itself is reported is a grave danger to the democratic process. Yet, so long as the press refuses to accept responsibility for large-scale reform, the public will continue to support close military control as an essential element of safety for its sons and daughters in the armed forces, and out of concern for the success of U.S. military operations. This book will be of interest to students of the press, of the military, and of the media at large.

Despite the vast body of texts inspired by warfare – from The Iliad to Maus – war writing is perpetually haunted by the notions of unrepresentability and inadequacy. War and Words examines the methods, conventions and pitfalls of constructing verbal accounts of military conflict in literature and the media. This multifocal study draws on a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including feminism, posthumanism, masculinity, trauma, spatiality and media studies, and brings together such diverse material as canonical literature, war veterans’ testimonies, imaginative fiction, computer games, English curricula, and Al-Qaeda’s propaganda pieces. In five consecutive sections – “Spreading War Propaganda”, “Reconstructing War Spaces”, “Envisioning War”, “Gendering War”, and “Teaching War” – the contributors consider war in its manifold aspects: as an ideological tool used for propaganda purposes, as a spatial reconstruction performed for the critical reassessment of past conflicts, as a projection (or extrapolation) of possible future conflicts and their social repercussions, as a political statement to deconstruct the oppressive nature of violence, and, finally, as a didactic tool to foster empathy. This collection will appeal primarily to academics specialising in English and American literature, but also to those researching media, gender, and game studies.

War in the Media Age also aims to provide a thorough grounding in the history of recent government/press relations during conflict, and in the mechanics of how presidents, the military, and the press do their jobs during war."--BOOK JACKET.