Noah Shachtman blogs on Wired: Danger Room…
For years, the Pentagon has come under harsh criticism its brain-dead approach to handling the media, broadly defined. From clamping down on bloggers to chucking out embedded reporters to banning digital cameras to quaking in fear of web developments, the military's press operators seemed to miss no opportunity to shoot themselves in the collective foot, repeatedly. All this, while insurgents trained potential terrorists online, advertised their martial prowess on YouTube, even sold t-shirts over the 'net.
But recently, things have begun to change. The Defense Department's Pentagon Channel started posting YouTube-esque videos. Bloggers have been called into more and more conference calls with senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Multi-National Force-Iraq set up its own YouTube channel.
Now, the Army has set up shop on content-sharing sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and YouTube. The material is pretty awful — like the stilted, propaganda-like reports, straight from the Armed Forces Network. It's a start, though.
But the military is a huge organization. And not everybody gets with the program, at an equal pace. A general is threatening to boot Michael Yon, the special-forces-soldier- turned-milbogger-supreme, out of Iraq — again.
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