Overall, I really like neilsmith’s post about the evolution of the Army’s media outreach. But there’s something that’s been really bugging me for a while about the Army’s embrace of social media; it implies that the Army as a bureaucratic organization still has some distance to go in developing its media capabilities. This is more or less basic organizational theory – when a hierarchical organization is too slow or underresourced to respond, it has to either decrease output, increase capability at the top, or derogate responsibility down the chain. I’d argue that while all three have happened, the top of the hierarchy still goes about media outreach the wrong way.

 Look, there’s no denying that the English-language media underreported non-kinetic efforts and events that mattered,  including aid, development, and local community outreach efforts. And certainly, these under-reported events did led to the widespread, and at one time largely-valid, perception that the media never reports "good news" from Iraq and Afghanistan. Let’s be frank: to some extent, the awful rule of "if it bleeds, it leads" still governs reporting coverage.

(Let me say this explicitly, in case anyone had any doubt: I don’t think this criticism applies to Spencer; I mean, for goodness sake, the man wrote a 10-part series on counterinsurgent bureaucratic maneuvering, and I’ve even cited his embedded reporting in the past… )

Now, the easy way out of this issue is simply to say that the media sucks. But there’s another factor here: the military doesn’t entirely know how to sell those issues to old media reporters, even as it’s figuring out the new media game.

When you blame someone for not reporting the "good news," it reads as a signal of discomfort and uncertainty. It doesn’t sound like you’re offering part of the story, but rather a press release. Instead, the military should take a page out of a different book, and use the already well-established media trope that 80% of a counterinsurgency is non-kinetic. If that’s the case, then a relative lack of reporting on aid, development, and local governance results in under-reporting 80% of the war. Right now, if I want to find out more about the development of the Afghan Air Corps, or what’s going on in particular battlespaces, or with certain development programs, I can probably eventually dig up either a post on a blog such as Afghanistan Shrugged, or a DoD Bloggers’ Roundtable, or an official report from a military command such as CSTC-A.  But the regular media scarcely reports on these crucial institutional and development issues that I alluded to yesterday. 

 And that’s a major problem. How do you fix it? Well, part of it is to package these stories as part of the same Clausewitzian war. But it could also be woven into the ongoing cable network battle, as well. Fox News and similar media outlets could stop banging the "why do you hate America" drum, and warm up the "why are you such bad reporters" subwoofer at 130 dB. If you’re going to be partisan, be aggressively well-armed with theoretical arguments, right? Beyond that, I have no real clue.