Winning hearts and minds at home
US military takes Iraq war to YouTube
The US military has taken the war in Iraq into cyberspace, with the launch of its own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube.
Its 25 brief clips include footage of US soldiers firing at unseen snipers in Baghdad, handing out footballs to Iraqi children and rescuing an Iraqi family injured by an explosive device.
Or, as it used to be called, simple propaganda.
If they’re trying to pretend they’re not trying to paint an overly positive picture of Iraq, perhaps they shouldn’t be referring to this as “cyberspace battle space”. And since soldiers on the ground have been banned from YouTube (among others, and the only possible justification for this is to supress whistleblowers), it should be pretty obvious how heavily this is going to be screened and watched.
(Via Slashdot, obviously.)
Alon Levy said,
May 15th, 2007 at 5:27 am
Iraq’s electricity situation is still worse than patchy, which means the main audience for those clips is American rather than Iraqi. Don’t you just love it when the military’s spending resources on domestic propaganda instead of on losing the conflict less spectacularly?
JoeDemocracy said,
May 15th, 2007 at 11:27 am
As you probably won’t like me (according to your painfully detailed and artfully crafted ‘about’ section) I’m just going to point a fellow ‘liberal democrat’ to a website where he might find some food for thought or feed the ideas available: http://www.opendemocracy.net. Since you don’t really have a blog roll…. no matter. As you say Youtube has been banned for all soldiers using US military networks - again, I think, increasing your view that youtube is becoming a military propaganda tool as they increase their ability to control content. In any case it would be interesting to investigate whether the meaning of ‘winning hearts and minds’ has shifted - its such an overused and overheated term these days: what does it actually mean? Brussels is nice btw, at least, I liked it. For some of my personal musings visit: http://www.mediacook.blogspot.com