The theme of soldier-driven narratives about the war continues to occupy my mind. After my post on video uploads from soliders to Youtube.com, I learned about The War Tapes, a documentary that was filmed in its entirety by soldiers in Iraq. The film is produced by Chuck Lacy, Robert May (The Fog of War) and Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie), who is also film editor. Director Deborah Scranton is a first time feature filmmaker and was in constant contact with the five soldiers who filmed for an entire year while in Iraq. She had turned down an opportunity to embed with the New Hampshire National Guard and asked instead if she could give soldiers cameras and train them how to use them.

From The War Tapes website:

Each [soldier] was given a one chip Sony high end consumer grade camera, tripod, microphone, various lenses and piles of blank tape, as well as my instant message handle. The tapes on average took two weeks to get from Iraq to New Hampshire. In the meantime, the soldiers uploaded quicktime files of scenes, explosions and ambushes. We chatted on IM about what had happened, together refining how best to tell the story. The experience was a mesh of interplays of present, future, perspective and reverberating memories. We filmed events in real time. We conducted interviews 24 hours later. These interviews were followed by more interviews months after incidents. This became a mutual journey.

(Watch clips from the soldiers here.)

A segment of the film (it premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29) was played at a UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism forum called "Iraq: Reports from the Frontlines." The forum (you can watch a webcast of it – link from this report) covered some of the most significant questions about reporting the war.

From UCBerkeleyNews:

The discussion centered on two deeply polarizing questions. Given the extreme danger of the situation in Iraq, are journalists in Iraq even able to cover the real story? And are they getting the story "right"?

These questions led to a series of sub-issues, including:

• Limited access to information when traveling with the U.S. military
• The complexities of relying on Iraqi stringers
• Security issues that make reporting difficult or impossible (and that leave bureau chiefs reluctant to send reporters into the fray)
• The nature of reports from Iraq (e.g. reporting the “bad” vs. the “good”)
• Reporting based on limited and classified information and related ethical questions a la Judy Miller

So how are news outlets responding to these questions? The New York Times, which has been under fire for its war-related reporting (Judy Miller), and is considered by many in the country to be at the center of the Axis of Liberal Media Evil, has started Frontlines, a series of soldier blog posts on its TimesSelect subscription service (you need to have a subscription to access). The four soldiers featured this month (the first month) have all been active bloggers during the war (see Wordsmith at War, Fire and Ice, SavvySkull, and Midnight in Iraq).

From the Midnight in Iraq blog, First Lt. Jeffrey D. Barnett, a Marine stationed in Falluja writes,

I recently received an email from the editor of the New York Times’ subscription portion of their web site, the Times Select. This email invited me to blog for the Times Select as part of a one-month promotion to publish select military blogs. This has a couple of implications. First, the Times blog will become my focus of effort. “Midnight in Iraq” will not be forgotten during this time, but expect to see posting slow down a bit. This is mainly due to the fact that my posts for the Times Select must remain exclusive to their website. I think this is a reasonable expectation for a subscription based service. However, if you subscribe to the New York Times or the Times Select you will be able to view my blog in its entirety. I will also keep “Midnight in Iraq” updated as new posts are made to the Times blog, and will post a link to their website from here.

Barnett’s readers’ responses to this post reveal the conflict over and distrust of the mainstream media (the Berkeley forum questions - Are journalists in Iraq even able to cover the real story? And are they getting the story "right"? - hover around the edges of these responses):

A sampling:

• Great news! I look forward to seeing the “real story” being published by the MSM [mainstream media].
• way to sell out to the man :(, the fact that the posts have to remain exlusive [sic] is kindof lame IMO.
• ¿What a sell out? Pffft. He gets to blog where he will get national exposure, he gets one hell of an interesting bullet point for his resume when he gets back to civilian life, and presumably he’s getting to pick up some extra cash on the side. Way cool!
• Your "mundane" everyday thoughts and stories have just the right dose of reality, humor, absurity [sic] and absurity [sic] of the reality to illustrate a colorfull [sic] picture for your readers. It helps us understand what you and the other marines in your battalion are going through and provides us a SMALL clue of the difficult mission you have been assigned.
• Contact, Contact!! Lock and load, button up, you are in enemy territory. Be alert!

This trend in war narrative/war reporting is an interesting hybrid of unmediated YouTube-like information sources and the overmediated access of the mainstream press to stories about the war. And let’s not forget the access to readership, though it is difficult to tell how many people are reading the Frontlines blog. A recent Barnett post on body armor, which raises a question about quantity vs. mobility (and challenges what he sees as the mainstream mass media’s message that more body armor is better), garnered the most reader responses (22) of the 10 posts thus far. The combination of the post and responses (many of which were from other soldiers) was instructive to me, because it reveals the complexities of the body armor question and that soldiers are not of one mind about the nature of body armor. It also reveals a respectful dance between soldier-blogger and civilian-reader: Thanks for your service, I respectfully disagree, Let me clarify, etc. The responses are moderated by The Times but, regardless, they reflect the post-Vietnam culture shift toward actively supporting soldiers, even if one is against the war and the government leaders who are brokering it.

I haven't seen The War Tapes yet (will try for Tribeca tix) and the Frontlines blog is just off the ground, but I am excited about this trend in information gathering and presentation w/r/t the war. Imagine feeling like you are part of a respectful debate, receiving and exchanging nuanced information about what is probably the most significant issue of our time. This can't be today's American media, can it?