William R. Levesque of the St. Petersburg Times has a great story in today's edition about CENTCOM — the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. It's not a new story, but it's a fresh take on this fast-changing blogosphere.
A three-person team monitors blogs - Internet journals with commentary from ordinary citizens and, often, links to news articles - that concentrate on CentCom's area of responsibility, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.
Team members contact blogs when inaccuracies or incomplete information is posted. They also ask bloggers if they can post a link to CentCom's Web site, or they offer access to CentCom information and news releases.
Page Two: a little more Levesque and some levity...
Defending CENTCOM's blog war, CENTCOM spokesman Lt. Col. Matthew McLaughlin proved himself a masterful propagandapologist:
"It lets CentCom get information about soldiers directly to the American people," said ...McLaughlin, a CentCom spokesman. "It allows us to bypass those traditional media business models that dictate what gets covered and what doesn't. It's not a story when a soldier does something that helps 50 people in Afghanistan."
He said it isn't about the media being biased. Instead, he said, CentCom recognizes that the media often has neither the time nor space to tell a complete story.
Poor media. Neocon noisemakers haven't had time to digest the memo yet:
Some bloggers, especially those leaning to the political right, applaud the effort, saying CentCom is bypassing a bias imposed by the media.
Personal opinion here — this is probably a good thing, and in any case we aren't going to stop it. The more propaganda the government spits out, the quicker us masses will recognize the odeur du jour.
The blogosphere process tends to foster transparency, intended or not. Certainly, the sort of endemic cynicism CENTCOM propaganda foments (flavored by Fox News, Judith Miller, et.al) is its own problem, but that's an issue whenever an oligarchy controls the media. Ordinary human beings learn ways to deal with it (Jewish Russian humor, anyone?)
So... got any funny samizdat to share? Click here or on the photo to go to a YouTube video that tries hard; it's from American Samizdat, a story on the Western North Carolina News Network (WNCNN).