About a month ago, I shared some serious qualms I had about the veracity of a story by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone on the PSYOP front. This month, RS is back again with more questionable coverage of the front, as Joshua Foust points out:
Reading the Rolling Stone piece, a reader walks away thinking that the killing of civilians is widespread and not at all limited to the troops associated with the â??kill team.â? The article paints the killings as the inevitable consequence of low morale and a rejection of counterinsurgency, and worse â?? it implies that murder is, in some way, a fact of being a soldier.These sorts of implications, however, are difficult to square with the truth. Attention was first shed on the killings by fellow soldiers disgusted at the â??kill teamâ??sâ? alleged actions. Army rules â?? and U.S. law â?? considers such actions grievous crimes and stipulates immediate and harsh punishment for them. While the Army bureaucracy was slow to move â?? sadly, all too common regardless of the issue, whether an illegal killing, a problem with healthcare or even adapting to a rural insurgency in a war most people had forgotten about â?? that doesnâ??t automatically mean there is a cover up. Incompetence is a far more reasonable explanation than malice.
The point is, this is starting to turn into "war porn" - pairing shock video and images designed to create buzz. But the effect is to turn all combat deaths into murder (something that the RS author might believe, but most people don't), and murder exploited to sell magazines. Foust again:
There is a term for the sort of journalism Rolling Stone is engaging in here: war porn. In 2005, George Zornick wrote of the growing trend of many people both in and out of the military treating images of the war â?? weapons, death, combat and so on â?? in the same way one would treat pornography. The people posting these images, Zornick explained, â??appear to regard the combat photos with sadistic glee, and pathological wisecracks follow almost every post.â?
