Officer of Marines Chester has an excellent post about the current situation of the global media, and how it impacts the United States' strategic goals. One of the things he challenges is the Defense Science Board's call for a "top down" revolution in conducting Strategic Communications:
No such orchestration is possible, if it ever was, for two reasons:There is a particularly American solution in the offing, as demonstrated by the MilBlogs ring. Several times in the recent past, slanders against the US military have been effectively countered by MilBloggers, acting without orders. While these operators are independent -- which gives them a credibility that official government statements do not have because of the walls of secrecy around government decisions -- they are choosing to coordinate of their own free will. Such coordination can create impressive results. Consider a few of these swarms, which are gathering around Mudville because of Greyhawk's leadership:
1) the mass media has an aversion to being the handmaiden for any government program and
2) the mass media is rapidly being replaced by a decentralized free global and private press that is unprecedented.
A top-down approach will not work if saving America's image is the goal.
On Newsweek. There's a lot to be said about this, but all of it falls under nondisclosure for me, so I won't. What should be noticed, though, is how many independent analyses gathered there.
A response to Bob Herbert's slanders was expanded to this second post. Another media-generated "the military is full of thugs" scandal, unmade by the simple fact that a lot of military men with actual experience now have a voice.
The military's own response in both cases has been muted. Even if there were a top-down authority firmly in place, however, I think Chester's right: it wouldn't be as effective as the MilBlog response, except perhaps as an additional means of raising the challenges to these stories that MilBloggers raise. It can ally itself to them, and give the rubrik of authority to their statements. But it can't do what they can do: the news media will regard any statement from such an authority as questionable simply because it was made in secret. MilBlogs offer transparency.
I don't see any reason a similar set of blogs couldn't be set up by institutions with the courage to do so. If State or CIA officials had the guts to say what General Cartwright said, we'd soon be in a stronger position as a nation. The bureaucracies don't like the idea, however, because it gives underlings a forum for complaints as well as for rising to the defense of the institution. (Consider the DiploMad.) Even this is a selling point, however, for those who are not timid. It is the independence of the voice that makes it credible. If they are free to praise or to condemn, their praise is valuable, and their condemnation can offer useful lessons for the improvement of the agency.
Protected free speech, transparency, and a shift of power away from the state and to the individual: that's the American way. Not only that, but we are the culture in the world most comfortable doing it, which means that other nations won't be able to replicate our success at it: there will be no Chinese MilBlogs ring.
If this distributed media is the wave of the future -- as many think it is, and I see no reason to disagree -- America has a chance to retain unassailably its position of information dominance. The way forward is to lift some of the restrictions on disclosure and speech by individuals who are within organizations, and then protect blog speech under the First Amendment.
Obviously there are places that cannot do so easily -- the CIA, for example, would have to think hard about what rules it might employ before allowing officers to blog. But for those that can, it is a powerful tool.
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