Cynthia Banham, War 2.0, and traditional media telling the truth about the Eels

It's a slow holiday Monday in loon pond. How else to explain the Sydney Morning Herald still trying to ring some juice out of Keysar Trad's bit of nonsense in favor of polygamy of a traditional male kind?

The column was run on 2nd October, yet it's still being given a splash on October 5th, and at time of writing still hadn't enraged enough of the flock to create a deluge of comments. Well we've said all we've got to say about Trad (here), and we'll say no more, seeing as how oxygen only gives the loon squawk more energy.

With Paul Sheehan turning into an ecstatic spiritual foodie - a kind of obverse of St Simon Stylites, avec du paine - and Cynthia Banham offering up a bizarre piece of futurism under the header How Twitter is changing the way wars are fought, things are looking grim for the new Herald banner the National Times.

To be fair to Banham, she's only riffing on The New York Times claim that twitter was changing everything about Iran, and manages to slip in an "only time will tell" as her "get out of jail" clause about the bright future of social media for changing everything, including wars.

But what can you say about this kind of FUD?

Is the democratisation of communication platforms aiding the cause of democracy, providing new ways to get around oppressive regimes that would otherwise stifle open debate?

What, like the way it works in North Korea and China, and the way it'll work when Chairman Conroy institutes his new regime?

Or is it just providing governments with new ways to spin its messages? The Australian Defence Force, for instance, uses its own photographers and video operators to create the images it prefers. These then get posted on the ADF website where the public can access them directly, in the process cutting out the traditional news reporters who might have taken a more objective view of whatever story the ADF is trying to push.

The battle for public opinion is after all as important a part of any war as bullets and bombs.

Well yes, but do truisms need to rule in traditional media?

Can someone please arrange for a course in history, concentrating on the role of censorship in traditional media during the course of the first and second world wars? Poor old traditional news reporters with their valiant attempts to bring the world the truth generally didn't manage to say boo to a goose.

The military managed to keep a tight rein on the media through both these events, and when television got too involved in Vietnam, they woke up to that game and promptly arranged for embedding, so that traditional journalism could once again be captured.

Not to mention the way the ADF has always employed its own photographers, put together its own footage, and even employed its own war artists as it kept coverage under its control as much as it could.

I guess in this particular case Banham is actually just hustling for attention for a symposium on War 2.o: Political Violence and New Media, which somehow reminded me of Vegemite branding. Can we wait until we get past the beta, and 2.0.1 is released, before we arrive at a consensus about how new media is changing war and war reporting? Afraid not:

Then again militaries have to contend for the first time with their young soldiers having access to mobile phones, digital cameras and laptops, and so perhaps it is actually losing some of the control it once had over the secrets of the battlefield, as events in Abu Ghraib in Iraq showed.

By golly, new media did an exceptionally fine job on William Calley, hey?

And what does it mean for accountability, when any individual can post manipulated footage on YouTube, or information on a blog site which hasn’t been subjected to some of the rigorous fact checking process newspaper or television or radio reporters have to go through before they can publish or air a story.

Oh dear just anyone can publish without going through the rigorous process of fact checking! Will someone fact check Miranda the Devine's opinions at the SMH, I wonder, before she stumbles into print suggesting it might be wise to hang greenies from the lamp post for causing bushfires?

The on-going smell of fear in the traditional media - exemplified by Mark Day - is a remarkable over-reaction to what are, at the end of the day, only a set of technological changes, which thus far don't seem to have affected inclinations to use war to settle disputes, or affected the control of traditional media in the reporting of conflicts.

Surely traditional media can relax just a little. They'll always have the option to do a Mark Kellogg, the newspaper reporter killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, along with George Armstrong Custer. He was the first AP correspondent, a stringer, to die in the line of duty for AP (wiki him here).

But to be safe, make sure that you leave notes and a diary so that, while the Indians might scalp you and take an ear, you'll have your place in posterity as a primary source. I can't imagine too many YouTubers or Tweeters or other social media exponents taking up that challenge, and you'd have to think any sensible grunt in the field will stay busy defending their asses rather than sending tweets back home, when in the heat of battle and surrounded by the baddies (not that we in any way mean to disrespect native Americans and their right to get upset at Custer).

Anyhoo, good luck with the conference and all that, let's hope as a result the participants don't immediately announce that all war is now over thanks to the benign influence of social media, the news of which might come as a sudden shock to the folks in Afghanistan.

Thin days indeed in the commentariat, but when you stumble over to The Punch, Australia's most tipsy conversation, it gets even worse, as you're suddenly confronted with a bunch of boofhead whingers.

It had its moments, but the NRL final was a snore, moans Luke MicIlveen, as a way of explaining how his team lost. The Eels were gone before the band struck up the national anthem, he blathers, perhaps because they didn't read his eight tips on how they could win by 8 points.

But his tragic pose was nothing compared to Paul Colgan's whinge about how the referees ruined it all for Sydney, under the header When does a bad refereeing decision really count?

Well it seems a bad decision really counts when your team is losing. So this long weekend provides at least a glimmer of hope - all the boofheads going behind the team shed to have a good cry about Sydney's hopes being shattered by those evil dudes from Melbourne. Now let's never speak of a form of football that doesn't involve much contact of the foot with the ball ever again.

Polygamy, tweets and boofheads. That's the lot this holiday Monday. Still, somehow Colonel Custer ties it all together, providing hope for traditional media, as they blog away about the way the Eels suffered their battle of the big horn with the Melbourne fiends.

Can Tuesday and that prattling Polonius Gerard Henderson come soon enough?

(Below: yep, it's yet another YouTube social media image manipulation, as performed in Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show in 1905, showing the death of Custer. Many historians have been taken in by this image, which purports to show the real event, but is in fact staged, as are many images on YouTube. You can find the source of this photo manipulation here).