Tuesday, March 25, 2003

WSJ on warblogs of journos, military enlistees (and shutdown of kevinsites.net). Today's Wall Street Journal features an article on war, weblogs, disinformation -- and the suspension of kevinsites.net. THE DAY ALLIED FORCES began their invasion of Iraq, a Navy lieutenant based in the Gulf posted some news on his personal Web site: "Saddam fired a couple of those Scuds that he doesn't have at me." On another personal Web site someone claiming to be a Baghdad resident wrote that "there are more Ba'ath people in the streets and they have more weapons." Kevin Mickey, a Navy lieutenant commander at Camp Patriot, Kuwait, noted on his site that "we had a minor dust storm yesterday" and said the camp's missile alarms were going off repeatedly. On top of the 500 reporters traveling with the military and the three cable-TV news channels beaming 24-hour coverage there's a new element in this war: unfiltered eyewitness accounts online. Soldiers and citizens in the war zone are publishing in real time on their own Web sites. Families are posting on the Web the e-mails sent home by relatives in the service. And free-lance reporters -- not subject to restrictions by the Pentagon or large media outlets -- are writing online for a new world-wide audience. In all, the glut of information from the Gulf -- from the important to the trivial -- is creating a dizzying panoply of detail, as well as half-truths. Link to WSJ story via Yahoo, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 2:52:16 PM    comments? []

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