Are there any good-faith justifications for an American military censor?
The word you're looking for is 'murdering'.
Because I was in the military in the past and because I grew up on the US continent, I probably have it ingrained in me to not use the words of violence like "murder" for these things, and instead I use the softer words that don't explicitly call out the death that is inflicted by the "bombing". I should work on that, for sure.
I was literally a Naval Officer on a ship doing counter drug operations about 10-15 years ago, and it was made very clear to us at the time that we were not to use weapons unless fired upon. The only exception was trained sharpshooters from the Coast Guard who were allowed to shoot outboard motors, though they were extremely careful about not harming the people on the boats. We'd "arrest" them (the Coast Guard would) and then turn them over to one of several partner countries. Once we captured the same person twice in one deployment. Today, I am not proud of what we did back then, as I am sure we caused more harm than good and spent more resources than was worth it to capture those drugs.
To be PERFECTLY CLEAR: we RARELY found fishing boats that had drugs on them, or who were even supporting drug operations. The fact that several fishing boats have been hit now makes it CLEAR to me FROM EXPERIENCE that we've MURDERED INNOCENT FISHERMEN because I KNOW that there is ZERO POSSIBILITY that all of these guys were a threat in any way. AT MOST these fishermen would refuel a drug boat, and I don't think that's worthy of death. Furthermore, those people usually were forced to do these jobs under threat from the gangs in their towns against their families, so killing these folks makes even less sense because they aren't the actual dangerous people who are running the narco-gangs.
It's a FUCKING SHAME what this country is doing to those people now and I am ASHAMED of having "served in the military" when in reality I was obviously just a tool for a fucked up regime that has finally gone mask-off.
Maybe they think they'll get access to them eventually if they're loyal.
It might seem cowardly, but it isn't that different to what happens every day in business. Society is full of organisations working on the "make the boss' opinions your own" principle.
Then you aren’t a journalist.
The people winning White House credentials are political influencers. Chomsky was an interesting linguist. His political observations are about as scientific as our current crop of Silicon Valley elites’.
The refutation is there are lots of places to sit. Like, yes, the people at a linguistics conference will predominantly be linguists. That doesn’t suggest a linguistics conspiracy.
Chomsky's whole point is that it doesn't take a conspiracy for journalists to share their superiors' views. Not for those superiors to be very aligned with each other.
That's Chomsky's point. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky explains how the appearance of collusion can arise without conspiracy. Like-minded people hiring and promoting like-minded people isn't a conspiracy, it only looks like one because people with similar incentives and values will behave in similar ways given similar circumstances.
What he said, and I agree is true and important, is that you won't get to work as a journalist and do things like, say, interview people for BBC, unless you believe most of the things your employer believes.
In fact the most common form of journalism you will find is what's akin to a Propaganda channel of a Sponsoring Party (Defense, Media Company, Political party, Rich Individual with an agenda, etc). Essentialy a PR employee.
But this is true since always.
The kind of journalism we usually think of though is Investigative journalism, but that's a different beast and usually doesn't really pay.
You seem to have presumed your conclusion.
There’s always a good reason, or good intentioned idea.
It’s why the saying about paver stones on the road to hell is all about.
There were certain norms that America counted on, to hold its governance mechanisms in check. Those checks and balances are being broken.
It is possible, that nothing will happen. People have fallen out of planes and survived. Maybe this will be America’s experience.
The country I knew, that many others used to be angry with, but also respect - would NEVER have left such a thing to simple chance. There used to be many who stepped into the breach.
And perhaps people are. It may simply be that this new information environment - geographically, financially consolidated, but ideologically divided - is ensuring that people who are solving problems and figuring things out, are unable to coordinate or gain traction. Gain traction in a manner that used to cross party lines.
I just have this feeling that in modern times if the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the NYTimes - but in the context of Ukraine, and especially if the previous administration was still in power, they very possibly might have instead alerted US intelligence instead of publishing them. WaPo repeatedly pat themselves on the back for playing a key role in tracking down the person who leaked the Pentagon documents in 2023. They mostly ignored what was leaked and instead framed everything as a story of tracking down the source and why he might do such a thing. We have a very broken media system, and this, probably unintentionally, might be a big first step in fixing it.
Any information that isn't approved by Hegseth is unauthorized. In other words, only what Hegseth allows could be written.
To call the bad would be an understatement.
I'm honestly not sure which rules the media outlets actually want changed.
IMO at best this is frogs* jumping out of water that was boiled too fast.
* an idiom based on a stupid truth, as the real frogs were sans-brain at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
People are not being hyperbolic. This is reducing the transparency of Pentagon to the American people. See also the Whitehouse banning the AP earlier this year.
> It's basically stating that if a news outlet publishes unauthorized information then they won't be allowed access to the Pentagon.
Without access it's going to be very hard to do good reporting, adversarial or otherwise. This is the government working to control what is said.
> You're generally going to be reluctant to frame entities that you have a positive relationship with in a negative way. And this agreement is essentially formalizing adversarialness.
The world is built on relationships. One of the keys of being a good journalist/reporter is being able to have relationships which help to build stories while also staying objective.
Yeah, any "benefit of the doubt" burned away months ago.
The administration is trying to control published opinions and value-judgements, as opposed to concealing sensitive military data.
From your worldview, do you not find the timing odd? The media releases one of the biggest ever leaks, completely embarrassing the government, and then the government welcomes them in, with privileged access no less, to one of the most sensitive locations in the entirety of the country? And this all happened under Nixon, a man who wasn't exactly known for his benevolence.
There was a time, not that long ago, when embedded war reporters were looked upon negatively. The reason is that it's impossible to remain impartial. This is not only because of the relationships you form in such a location, but also because if "imparial" ends up being negative, you're getting 'unembedded' quite quickly. So it ends up being defacto propaganda.
Think about what "transparency" we've gained from the media being embedded with the Pentagon since 1972. It mostly doesn't exist. Even if somebody wants to leak something it's not like they're going to walk up to a journalist in the Pentagon to do it. On the contrary, the media seems to have become ever more ingrained into the military industrial complex ever since this date, to the point that in 2023 WaPo spent more time trying to track down a leaker and assess his possible motives, than covering what was leaked.
Government and media should be kept separated, and this act is, probably unintentionally, helping to do exactly that.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
[2] - https://nation.time.com/2012/09/27/pentagons-correspondents-...
The Pentagon Papers covered the period from 1945 to 1968. Nixon took office in 1969. If the leaks were embarrassing, they were particularly embarrassing to the JFK/LBJ administrations. Nixon initially didn't intent to do anything about the leak. Henry Kissinger convinced him that allowing the leaking of classified documents in the press would set a bad example:
"President Nixon’s reaction that Sunday morning was that the damage fell mostly on the Johnson Administration and that he should leave it alone. That afternoon, however, security advisor Kissinger convinced Nixon that he had to act on “this wholesale theft and unauthorized disclosure.”
“The massive hemorrhage of state secrets was bound to raise doubts about our reliability in the minds of other governments, friend or foe, and indeed about the stability of our political system,” Kissinger said in his memoirs.
Once energized, Nixon soon became obsessed. Dissatisfied with the FBI’s progress in the case, he organized his own group of investigators in the White House. They styled themselves “the plumbers” because their job was to stop leaks."
-- https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0207pentagon/
If Nixon had ignored Kissinger that day, he would probably close to the top of the typical lists of greatest US Presidents rather than close to the bottom.
As for the impact of the papers directly on Nixon, he could have been honest and immediately come forth with the truth when entering office. He chose not to, which made him complicit in the lies of previous administrations. This is also why if you ask somebody who's war was Vietnam? Most of everybody is going to say Nixon.
You can see strong parallels with Trump and Ukraine in modern times. It's obvious the government is not being at all honest about their assessment of the situation over there, yet Trump continues to 'play along' with the lies and indeed this is a big part of the reason why Ukraine will likely go down in history as 'Trump's War.'
If the 'Ukraine Papers' were leaked, Trump would certainly first try to pin it on Biden, but in reality nobody cares about Biden anymore - and instead the papers would mostly just reveal his own lies and complicity.
You want to censor in the armed forces? Classify. You don’t tell reporters they can’t publish anything unapproved. Tomorrow the director gets caught stealing and toppling regimes and you can’t publish a word. After a long time of obeying this, you will fear doing so.
Brilliant strategic play on the Trump admin. Win or lose, the pentagon is more opaque. I just wish they would used some of that brilliance on things that improved the world and adhered to why we have governments in the first place.
So if they were to be approached by a whistleblower or happened to hear the right conversation or find the right documents, it'd be fair game.
Nice caveat, noting that none of your friends are doing that. But plenty of people do really dangerous, stupid shit and upload it to YouTube for the advertising dollars. Because news media is usually ultimately financed by advertising or partisan donors pushing a specific viewpoint, they're incentivized to publish dangerous stuff - but only the kind people want to see, which is why outlets like the New York Times didn't host video clips showing the outright gore from Charlie Kirk getting shot. The democratic value of an independent media rests on editorial discretion finding content that shocks its audience but not its advertisers.
If your answer is "the government", then every cover up will never be revealed, and the government will answer to no one.
If your answer is "journalists", then you have the status-quo in any functioning democracy.
And when it actually moves into sedition territory, that's what an independent court system is for.
Unfortunately, once things devolve into a two-party system, it becomes ever increasingly difficult to keep the various branches independent.
Moving on to a new version is to waste your own intelligence in reactionary sentence creation.
They’re not subject to FOIA you say? Perhaps there’s a difference to the organizations after all.
However, Apple is a private company and can do whatever it pleases, however shitty that behavior is.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/29/we-will-coup-whoever...
I had a friend go deep into addiction. I think there was a period when every headline was his doing, too.