iraq and information control.
Last night Oliviero Bergamini, a telegiornalist and professor of journalism, spoke about US political discourse and the war in Iraq to a small house at the Societa Letteraria here in Verona. He made an interesting argument about the difficulty of controlling information in Iraq. Compared with Vietnam, there are many more channels and sources of information for the US media system. And he's right. A dedicated citizen can find a breadth and depth of information about Iraq that far exceeds what was available in Vietnam. Bergamini cited the usual suspects--24-hour news channels and the web--in arguing that information was far more readily available.
He's right. What we know about the War in Iraq far exceeds what was known about Vietnam at this point in that exercise. We already have the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and the MyLai incident in the form of reporting about the absence of wmd, leaks about the debates leading up to the war, the Abu Ghraib photos, and any number of reports about US military abuses. And much of this has come through nonprofessional sources. Abu Ghraib came from the digital cameras of US military personnel. for instance.
A story that Seymour Hersh tells illustrates the differences between the two wars. Hersh, who published the story that began the My Lai saga, got a phone call (this was well over a year ago) from a US serviceman telling him about a massacre some weeks before. The serviceman had witnessed a company going berserk on a village after coming under fire; dozens (if I remember correctly) were killed, and the serviceman, who was having trouble sleeping at night, either e-mailed Hersh or called him on a cell phone, expecting Hersh to give it the full My Lai. But no dice. Hersh says he understands exactly what happened in that case, and it wasn't at all like My Lai. Some scared kids overreacted, which is way different from My Lai, which was part of a systematic campaign to pacify the countryside through blood and terror.
In Vietnam, it was possible for the military to delay, postpone, and usually kill negative news, at least until the steady production of corpses had turned the public against the war. There were obvious bottlenecks at which the Pentagon could exert some control over the flow of information.
Now one cannot any more control the flow of information. But that doesn't mean it's difficult to control the flow of discourse. Even if disconfirming information is saturating the system, the forces of the right still seem to control the discourse, and journalists seem to help them. No amount of information seems capable of dislodging the discourse.
And that's what we need to explain--how the free flow of information helps support discursive control. Anyone? How can you explain why all the disturbing informaiton--and Abu Ghraib sums it up for me--hasn't changed the dominant account?
Last night Oliviero Bergamini, a telegiornalist and professor of journalism, spoke about US political discourse and the war in Iraq to a small house at the Societa Letteraria here in Verona. He made an interesting argument about the difficulty of controlling information in Iraq. Compared with Vietnam, there are many more channels and sources of information for the US media system. And he's right. A dedicated citizen can find a breadth and depth of information about Iraq that far exceeds what was available in Vietnam. Bergamini cited the usual suspects--24-hour news channels and the web--in arguing that information was far more readily available.
He's right. What we know about the War in Iraq far exceeds what was known about Vietnam at this point in that exercise. We already have the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and the MyLai incident in the form of reporting about the absence of wmd, leaks about the debates leading up to the war, the Abu Ghraib photos, and any number of reports about US military abuses. And much of this has come through nonprofessional sources. Abu Ghraib came from the digital cameras of US military personnel. for instance.
A story that Seymour Hersh tells illustrates the differences between the two wars. Hersh, who published the story that began the My Lai saga, got a phone call (this was well over a year ago) from a US serviceman telling him about a massacre some weeks before. The serviceman had witnessed a company going berserk on a village after coming under fire; dozens (if I remember correctly) were killed, and the serviceman, who was having trouble sleeping at night, either e-mailed Hersh or called him on a cell phone, expecting Hersh to give it the full My Lai. But no dice. Hersh says he understands exactly what happened in that case, and it wasn't at all like My Lai. Some scared kids overreacted, which is way different from My Lai, which was part of a systematic campaign to pacify the countryside through blood and terror.
In Vietnam, it was possible for the military to delay, postpone, and usually kill negative news, at least until the steady production of corpses had turned the public against the war. There were obvious bottlenecks at which the Pentagon could exert some control over the flow of information.
Now one cannot any more control the flow of information. But that doesn't mean it's difficult to control the flow of discourse. Even if disconfirming information is saturating the system, the forces of the right still seem to control the discourse, and journalists seem to help them. No amount of information seems capable of dislodging the discourse.
And that's what we need to explain--how the free flow of information helps support discursive control. Anyone? How can you explain why all the disturbing informaiton--and Abu Ghraib sums it up for me--hasn't changed the dominant account?
posted by jnerone at 2:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home