Can we stop the truth from being a casualty of war?

This thread was inspired by the Egyptian/Middle East revolutions conversation. When a regime or war threatens to close down or control the media, what can we, the people on the front line or media organisations (assuming we, and they, value their impartiality) do about it? How do we ensure a story coming from the trenches isn't empty rumour or propaganda?

A couple possibilities: auto-filtering through thousands of different videos to pick up consistent looking stories? Mount a camera on a BigDog-style robot and use it as an embedded journalist?

What's wrong with regular embedded journalists? I think a robot would actually be easier for the military to controll.

edited 16th Mar '11 6:28:06 AM by HungryJoe

I remember a few months ago there was a journalist on the BBC World Service talking about how getting embedded with the military is a bad idea, because then the military controls where you go, how you get there, and what you see.

^

It isn't so much that as it is that the military aren't tour guides, you can miss out on getting lots of information and pursuing a specific story because they aren't there to babysit a journalist, they are there for a mission.

Sometimes though, an embedded journalist ends up doing things with a military unit that makes for a great story, such as the things Evan Wright went through with 1st Recon in Generation Kill.

Because going on convoys all the time is actually pretty boring, you can only write about the experience of being in an IED blast so many times before there isn't much to tell that hasn't already been said.

I'm not exactly sure what the issue at hand in the OP is.

Journalism is not simply eyes and ears on the ground. You can have a million cameras across the battlefield, but unless you have someone in the background who knows an Abrams tank from a T-72, you won't have any idea what's going on. The main problem today is not collecting data (situations like Fukushima excepted), but filtering and corroborating data. The key to that is time and manpower at the analytical side of journalism. (That's why truly impressive investigative pieces aren't written the next day, but after three months. Or three years.)

Modern journalism, sadly, has mostly neither enough manpower (due to budget constrains) nor enough time (due to an incredibly accelerated operational tempo). It leaves the profession in a race for ratings while doing nothing but chronicling single events, instead of putting them into context.

Thus, if you ask me (as a part time analytical journalist) what you can do, it's quite simple: First, value and support high quality work. And second, offer expertise. Good journalists are fast learners, but they are seldom experts in more than one or two fields. The 'net gives them a chance to quickly verify data by actually seeking out missing expertise.

Take, for example, Libya: It's not a lack of on-the-ground sources that's really a problem. The real problem is that you need independent knowledge to put all that source data into context. You need translators. People who know the culture. People with picture archives to determine where the latest youtube video was taken. People with a more than rudimentary grasp of military operations. The list goes on and on, and if you want fast coverage, you need fast access to this kind of knowledge.

In the long run, this is more important than the number of embedded or free-roaming journalists. (As long as there's more than one.) Plus, it takes some pressure from them if they don't have to try and explain everything they report.

Fog of War - lack of information happens all the time in high op-tempo environments. In the absense of information, people speculate.