Monday, January 21, 2008
The New York Times writes about a blogger
The Grey Lady has a nice article about Michael Yon, the blogger who has spent more time embedded with the American military in Iraq than any other journalist, "citizen" or otherwise. It is on the front page of the business section, which for some reason is the usual location of media criticism in the Times. To the paper's credit, the story about Yon is a lot more charitable than most blog posts about the NYT. Read the whole thing -- the most important pearl of wisdom is from Michael himself, and it appears in the last paragraph:
In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Yon went through a period of rocky relations with the military hierarchy, which at times tried to bar him from accompanying units. But since then, things have improved, and the military has generally become more conscious — and solicitous — of Internet journalists. To Mr. Yon, ever-hopeful about the war, that change is healthy for Iraq, as well as for him.
“If you have bad media relations, you don’t know how to run a counterinsurgency,” he said. “Now they’re very good at it.”
Even the most cheerful supporters of America's military would admit that the Pentagon took a long time to clue in to the power of blogging in the information war. As Mark Moyar ably demonstrates in his outstanding revisionist history
of the Vietnam war, it was once possible for a small number of reporters, less than a dozen, to control not only the public's perception of the war, but that of the Washington bureaucracy. That is no longer true, in no small part due to Michael Yon.2 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Mon Jan 21, 06:16:00 PM:
Hm. The NYT hires an actual conservative. Then does a story on Yon that is reasonably fair. Is the Pinch on vacation or something?
By Purple Avenger, at
Mon Jan 21, 08:16:00 PM:
Totten has been doing work easily the equal of Yon's lately...arguably even better.
