[LadyDoc]

"Using the media as an asymmetric warfare weapon is pretty common, and sometimes it works. It worked in Somalia. It worked several times in the Balkans during the 1990s. Islamic fundamentalists use the media as one of their more potent weapons. The use of imbedded reporters during the Iraq war is seen by the Department of Defense as a use of asymmetric warfare against potentially dangerous media. Indeed, many media pundits have said as much, and darkly warn that the media cannot tolerate more such "defeats" in the future. "

sound about right to me...

[upchuck]

Thanks for posting this. Intersting concept, perhaps best personified through guerrilla tactics where the enemy looks like the natives and makes clever use of available materials. Mel Gibson fighting the British in "The Patriot" comes to mind.

[RangerHobbit]

The NVA Colonel formerly in charge of the communist press corps during the Vietnam War, who was an adjutant to General Giap and who was also present at the South Vietnamese surrender, eventually fled Vietnam for France because he'd become so disillusioned with the communist regime. There've been hundreds of communists just like him in fact; people who've fled to France, the US, or elsewhere.

He wrote a piece in a Paris newspaper last year that was widely circulated on the Ranger web ring, stating that during the great Tet Offensive bloodbath of 1968, America essentially wiped out nearly every NVA and Viet Cong infantry unit, while suffering over 4000 KIA themselves in this great 3 1/2 month battle. Some 70,000 NVA and VC, 20,000 ARVN, and possibly as many as 160,000 civilians died in this nationwide affair, with the heaviest fighting by far taking place in I Corps.

He stated that had the US stepped up their bombing after Tet and invaded the NVA's Laotian sanctuaries, the communists were ready to sue for peace -even surrender, because they'd been so terribly mauled mainly by B52s, the 101st Airborne Division, and the 1st Marine Division in I Corps during Tet. In short, they'd been beaten and were ready to quit. Yet so effective were US Marxists in manipulating the campus antiwar movement and the US media, that this colonel gave much credit for the communist victory in Southeast Asia to the US media, to television especially.

As to Somalia, the Ranger community only regards it a defeat insofar as the Commander in Chief at the time was a gutless jellyfish who was too timid to act in sending relief forces without the sanction of UN approval. In other places and times such people as he, would have been shot for cowardice.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

American soldiers are dying in Iraq because of the hope Islamofascists have that "the referee" (as Goldwater styled journalism after the 1964 election) might award them victory on style points.

The truth is that journalism was politics when Jefferson and Hamilton sponsored competing journals in which to wage their partisan battles--and that journalism has never--all pious protestations to the contrary notwithstanding--stopped being politics. All campaign regulation, and all government licensing of the broadcasting of politics, is illegitimate under the First Amendment.

And eventually someone is going to haul the FCC into court and ask it to justify giving certain people monopoly speech rights in the form of broadcast licenses which empower the likes of CBS or indeed PBS to propagandise opposition to Republican governance in general and deadly opposition the U.S. military in particular. I would think a class-action lawsuit by Americans in harm's way in Iraq--or their relatives at home--would lie.

Note that this would not threaten freedom of the (literal) press, nor should it threaten the Internet. Only the Establishment which is the FCC and its licensees is called into question.

Why Broadcast Journalism
is Unnecessary and Illegitimate