A day after Christmas, a couple of reporters at The Washington Post saw fit to impugn the journalistic motives of blogger Bill Roggio. Why?
posted 01.30.06
Smearing the Competition
On December 26, 2005, an error-riddled article appeared in the Washington Post, headlined "Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War," in which reporters Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck intimated rather bluntly that well-known blogger Bill Roggio was acting as an agent for a U.S. information warfare operation. Note the juxtapositions in their story:
Frustrated by the coverage they were receiving from the news media, the Marines invited Roggio, 35, who writes a popular Web log about the military called "The Fourth Rail," to come cover the war from the front lines.
He raised more than $30,000 from his online readers to pay for airfare, technical equipment and body armor. A few weeks later, he was posting dispatches from a remote outpost in western Anbar province, a hotbed of Iraq's insurgency.
"I was disenchanted with the reporting on the war in Iraq and the greater war on terror and felt there was much to the conflict that was missed," Roggio, who is currently stationed with Marines along the Syrian border, wrote in an e-mail response to written questions. "What is often seen as an attempt at balanced reporting results in underreporting of the military's success and strategy and an overemphasis on the strategically minor success of the jihadists or insurgents."
Roggio's arrival in Iraq comes amid what military commanders and analysts say is an increasingly aggressive battle for control over information about the conflict. Scrutiny of what the Pentagon calls information operations heightened late last month, when news reports revealed that the U.S. military was paying Iraqi journalists and news organizations to publish favorable stories written by soldiers, sometimes without disclosing the military's role in producing them....
In addition, the military has paid money to try to place favorable coverage on television stations in three Iraqi cities, according to an Army spokesman, Maj. Dan Blanton....
Fully disclosing
In the interests of full disclosure I should note that Roggio and I have had public disagreements about the effectiveness of the Iraq invasion and occupation in the larger strategy to win the war on terror, as well as on the effects and possible outcomes of various military and diplomatic operations and strategies within the Iraqi theater. This is only to be expected, given the broad spectrum of opinion within the conservative blogosphere, as versus the lockstep intellectual and ideological rigidity evidenced in the left side of the same sphere.
I'll leave Bill's defense to himself. He's admirably suited to carry it out and, in fact, has already done a fine job in exposing the egregious, probably even intentional errors in the WaPo's own attempt at an information warfare operation aimed at blog reporters like Roggio and Michael Yon, another blogger targeted in the article.
The larger question is, of course, why is the Washington Post launching an attempt to smear bloggers who become active reporters?
I think the answer is simple, and if nobody else will point it out, I'll be happy to do so.
Competition.
The mainstream media, of which the WaPo is an icon, has taken some terrible hits in the past few years, courtesy of the blogosphere. RatherGate, the Swift Boat Veterans' reports about John Kerry, the speed with which charges against GWB were effectively disputed and debunked in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a host of other examples big and small have made it clear that the mainstream's former stranglehold as gatekeepers to the news of the day has been broken. In fact, in large part the major media's current justification for its existence—now that its claims to fairness, impartiality, expertise, and objectivity have been effectively destroyed—is left with but a single advantage to reserve for itself.
Well, they do now
"Bloggers don't report news," the MSM claims. "All they do is ride as parasites on the backs of real journalists who report the news. The major media is the only organization that has the technical expertise, the wealth, the experience, and the contacts to actually go out and gather the news that bloggers can only comment upon."
Until bloggers like Roggio raise money from their own readers, buy their own equipment, and go out and cover the news as well as, or better than, the mainstream media journalists do. And this is only the first, tiniest trickle of what will eventually become the wave that threatens the very foundations of the mainstream media itself.
The blogosphere has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of willing potential reporters—many with closer ties, better connections, and more expertise on any given story that the mainstream media can possibly hope to bring to bear. This is an immense resource the blogosphere is still trying to figure out how best to make use of. One concept involves the creation of blogger-syndicates like Pajamas Media. Others make use of lone-wolf, reader-financed efforts like Roggio's. There will be other, entirely different arrangements coming down the pike, but they will all have one thing in common: They will supplant the mainstream media, and demonstrate that there are other paradigms just as effective at gathering news, just as trustworthy if not more so, much less expensive, much faster, and possessing much greater expertise than the lumbering dinosaurs of today's current big media.
Competition, in other words. Highly effective competition, in fact.
This response to Roggio from the Washington Post is but one of the early shots in a war to the death between new media and old. Predictably, rather than try to improve their own operations to meet the strengths of the new threat, the old media icons are responding with the weapons they know best: i.e., smears, lies, innuendo, fear campaigns, and all the other tools they have used to such great advantage in abusing for their own purposes and goals the gate-keeping powers they once had.
This won't work either. All you have to do is read Roggio's reports, and then read the slanted propaganda that passes for news in WaPo and other MSM organs. In this case good reporting will drive out bad. But that doesn't mean the mainstream media will lose the war by refusing to fight. The war is already raging, and this incident is merely another battle in it.
What it is
Since I don't know that anybody else has said it this baldly, allow me: This article in the Washington Post is a deliberate and dishonest attempt to smear a good and honest reporter for reasons that have nothing to do with honesty on WaPo's part, and everything to do with its need to destroy the most effective competition the mainstream media has ever seen.
It will fail. [Add your comment]
Reprinted by permission of the author from Daily Pundit, Bill Quick's popular political blog. Mr. Quick is a prolific novelist.
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See also "Disinformation Operations" by Bill Roggio
The disputed Washington Post story
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