Here is my piece from the current issue of the Walkley magazine:
These are strange days in the development of media and politics in America.
On March 22nd, with his popularity at a record low, Bush urged his audience in West Virginia to blog the message. The clip can be seen at The Blog Herald site.
To a standing ovation, a Bush supporter said that the major TV networks never report all the good happening in Iraq. She believed if only Americans could see and hear about all this good then there would never be another negative word spoken about America’s involvement in Iraq.
Bush responded by saying:
I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there's blogs, there's internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate which is literally changing the way people get their information and so if you're concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and just keep the word moving.
A few years ago, we would have expected to hear that sort of response from the likes of former Democrat presidential hopeful, Howard Dean.
Earlier in the same month, Bush’s fierce ally, Rupert Murdoch, told a London audience that there’s a media revolution underway.
What impact has this media revolution had on our understanding of America’s latest to use military intervention to spread freedom?
The deaths of several hundred thousand insurgents and civilians attracted little attention in America’s first major imperialist adventure a century ago in the Philippines. The Spanish War was supported by the American media and there was little prospect of an on-the-ground Filipino view of the conflict interrupting the steady flow of nationalism.
Thirty years ago, the newish medium of television brought the horrors of the Vietnamese War to our living rooms and helped discredit American policy and weaken political support for that doomed attempt to contain the perceived threat of Asian communism.
This time round the picture is a lot more complex. America is once again a polarized nation.
Blogger and ActiveWords CEO, Buzz Bruggeman says “I am living in Seattle now, and frankly opposition to the war is so unified and extensive, that I am always surprised to hear anyone who thinks it is a good idea. This is in contrast to the directly opposite sentiment that I experienced when I lived in Florida”. Both sides of this divide seem to see the media as biased against them.
While Bush sees blogs as one way of getting around an unsympathetic media, opponents of the war like Melbourne blogger Cameron Riley see an almost mirror image: “While the US and Australian press continually ran stories on Operation Swarmer which read like a press release from the Pentagon, Iraqi blogs claimed it was a complete farce and indicated that the areas where Swarmer was being carried out were known to be barely inhabited.”
The blogosphere is very active on Iraq. According to Technorati the word Iraq regularly appears in about 5,000 to 6,000 posts a day but on one day last year it soared to 15,000. While diverse, they seem to be overwhelmingly anti-war.
Adelaide blogger Lee Hopkins says: “My reading of the blogosphere is that blogs are run predominantly by left- rather than right-wing voters. Thus, the vast majority of blogs about Iraq are negative, focusing on the Coalition of the Willing, Bush and the death toll after four years of conflict”. Most of the bloggers writing about Iraq live outside the country but there is also a lot of activity by people with direct experience of the conflict.
Today, Iraqi blogs number almost 200,according to Iraq Blog Count , a site run by an Australian woman who identifies herself as Émigré.
Australian ejournal Online Opinion uses blogs to give a dimension to its coverage of Iraq which editor Graham Young says is in short supply in the Australian media.
On the same tack, Australian author and journalist Antony Loewenstein says these bloggers make a significant contribution to our understanding of the conflict and its aftermath: "it's amazing how used we are in the west to simply getting the news on this quagmire from western journos, living in comparative luxury, rather than listening to Iraqis themselves, many of whom are writing and suffering the daily strife."
Salam Pax is one of the best-known Iraqi bloggers having got a book deal out of his reporting from Baghdad, and a world trip which even included a star stint at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2004.
"By having a continued presence on the web, Iraqis are able to engage in dialogue and contribute to the discussion that goes on around the internet," Salam Pax told Aljazeera.net in March this year.
"Recent Salon.com articles quote Iraqi bloggers on the situation in Baghdad, and many bloggers have contributed articles or given interviews to magazines and newspapers." "You might not change the world with a blog, but you sure can raise a couple of eyebrows and open paths of communication and understanding," he said. On his Australian visit, Salam Pax told Andrew Denton of the ABC Enough Rope program that at first “most people were kind of not believing that someone in Baghdad would be writing this.
There was so much doubt and thinking, "No, no, no." Then came the period when everybody was saying, "He's definitely either CIA or the secret police," which was fun.” In fact, the military has a highly-visible presence on the Internet.
Milblogging.com has compiled a list of more than 1,200 military blogs in 22 countries (but mostly American), including 322 coming out of Iraq. In March, Milblogging.com reported with approval this analysis by author, Jonathan Foreman: “Millions more Americans now understand the untrustworthiness and dishonesty of the mainstream media — especially the half a million troops who have served in Iraq and who have seen their work go unreported or be misrepresented. You can be sure that you are getting less than half the picture unless you read milblogs and Iraqi blogs …”
Mark Thomson of the Canberra-based blog Seeking Asylum Downunder says “there are also many sites situated in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and other predominantly Muslim countries, some of which are propaganda tools for various anti-US and anti-Israel groups and some are published by genuine human rights organisations”. On the Internet there are blogs from just about every imaginable viewpoint. “As usual, the task is to sift the grain from the chaff”, says Mark Thomson.
Indeed, but as Bush says, if the media doesn’t want to know your story there are many other ways to get the message out these days.
Trevor, it was fun to read your take on Iraqi blogging since I took a slightly different angle on April 26th, as I thought about it... These kinds of things can distort the great exchanges that could describe more corporate tables and I'd really appreciate your widsom on that.
Posted by: Ellen Weber | 29 April 2006 at 06:38 AM