Blogworld Expo 07 - Milblogging from the Front

The panel consisted of Ward Carroll (moderator), Tim Boggs, Thomas Nichols, Chuck Ziegenfuss and Gordon Alanko. Uncle Jimbo was in the audience. The audience was very, very sparse. Fewer than 20 people came.

Chuck got started blogging when he got fed up with the lack of complete reporting from Iraq. He was very unhappy with what he saw and how he felt it was inaccurate.

Tim was deployed in the initial invasion of Iraq. The week after he got back, the Abu Ghraib story broke and he saw how totally inaccurate the reporting was. That drove him to blog when less than a year later he was deployed again. It gave people back home a chance to have a conversation with him and ask about the things they saw in the media. He is setting up a team blog at his site.

Tom Nichols got started while in recruiting back in 2005 and was getting ready to go back into the infantry and started a blog after finding wizbang. When he deployed, he began milblogging. He was trying to give an idea of what they saw and did.

Was there a stigma among their peers from being a blogger? Being a writer in the army was not something good. The bloggers didn’t feel any such thing. Chuck felt that his blogging doesn’t affect his job. He was cautioned only once not to portray the battalion in a bad light. I could see how this would be going around the chain of command.

Tim started out doing interviews with soldiers. He then got flak from people he didn’t interview.  Fox News found his blog and he got interviewed by then. When he got back, the command found out about his blog, but no one really bothered him about his blog or what he wrote. When he was interviewed by Fox, he had no Public Affairs interface.

Gordon had both good and bad experiences with it. His commanding officer started a blog as well. Because of that, he had someone he could go to as a sanity check. Within his platoon there was a wide range of opinions.

Tom found blogging in Iraq was a challenge. He felt his battalion CO was sour on blogging in his command. He made sure that his command had permission to stop him from posting and he made sure not to mention anyone in his unit until they heard what he was going to post first. It limited what he wrote, but it was ethical.

What was the mission statement of their blogs? Chuck was unhappy about the reporting from the MSM. Journalists that he escorted were writing articles that were completely out of whack with what they had seen together. For him, the blog was also cathartic following his patrols. It was also a way to communicate with his wife.

Tim’s mission statement was to provide an equalization to the MSM. Michael Ware said that soldiers don’t know what they’re talking about because they see such a small subsection of the war. Tim agrees to a point, but in the aggregate, the milbloggers at the front certainly give a good take. What disturbs the milbloggers is not the context so much as the facts are being reported dead wrong. There is an ongoing friction between the MSM and the milbloggers. Of course, there’s an ongoing friction between the MSM and all of us. The milbloggers are upset at being too stupid to be doing the same job as the journalists.

Gordon’s mission was to tell the story. He started writing for friends and family and then discovered that he was writing for a bigger audience. He was in Anbar during the transformation of the province. The Ramadi PAO was killed while escorting a journalist mentioned that the PAO was killed, but didn’t bother to write about the great work that the PAO had done before that. It was all about the statistic and the death and not about the accomplishments and the life.

Tom expected his blog to go into hibernation when he deployed. He didn’t think he’d have time to write. He wasn’t there to put a spotlight on what they were doing, instead it was a description of what life was like at the front.

The panel discussed the Army’s crackdown on the milbloggers, but I have to admit I’m not that interested in the subject. Apparently, the PAOs got in the middle of things and mucked things up. There was friction between the milbloggers and the PAO establishment over the content and quality of the information that was released. I have to agree with the milbloggers here as the PAO-released information is stunningly dull. I’m sure there were some cases of milbloggers doing inappropriate things and this crackdown was an overreaction to those events. That kind of pendulum swinging happens all the time in large organizations as they try to find general solutions to specific cases.

Milbloggers have seen a big change in the way in which the soldiers are perceived. They have also seen changes in the way the public supports them through things like Soldiers’ Angels.

The MSM is catering to the enemy. No matter what the milbloggers do and no matter what CENTCOM puts out, if Osama puts out a five year old video, the MSM covers it completely. That’s where the customers still are, but that’s changing. The MSM is getting nervous that the DoD is reaching out to the bloggers. Chuck said, “The Ernie Pyle of today is the milblogger.” That’s a great quote.

There are lots of soldiers on MySpace posting pictures of themselves at the front, trying to impress their girlfriends back home. The underlying background information in those photos and stories are what concern the PAO.

The milbloggers loved the commenters who would write to them and show their support. It was also great to show the non-blogging members of their units how the people back home cared about them. Chuck was injured in Iraq and when he got back from hospital he received a ton of care packages from his blog readers. The care packages got shipped off to his comrades at the front, but he was deeply touched by the outpouring of goodwill from his readers.

The milbloggers are very aware of how this is changing the way in which history is recorded. It’s a big change from the controlled, MSM view of wars in the past.