Jane Hall seems to be a modern woman with many interesting view points within the new evolution of media and the government and I enjoyed reading her point of view on several modes and mediums of recent political issues and topics. First of all, the very lengthy journal she wrote about embedded journalists during wartime and how the media will work within the next war was very intriguing. At first, I was more struck with how many quotations and statistics were cited as opposed to what she was saying but as you continue to read, her point of view also nudges its way through the piece. Journalists are key to covering a war, they shape many perspectives of society and how citizens see and support the war, and we need to acknowledge the work these journalists do. However, it is also important to take the information they gather with a grain of salt. She points out how the journalists covering the Iraq war had often never covered anything like this before, saying that they often misconstrued what was actually happening or covered hardware and technical aspects of the war with a “geewhiz” attitude. Additionally, they only see their small piece of the grand puzzle in what is happening over there. While their experiences are obviously true to what is happening, there are greater issues and problems that they are perhaps out of touch with and only aware of what is happening right within their realm of vision.
The most important point she made, however, was that even though we had 600 journalists covering this most recent war and even though embedding journalists seems to be the plan in terms of how future wars will be handled in terms of media coverage, we still don’t and won’t have a handle on what is happening within the war and wars to come. The reason being the growing importance of Special Operations during war tactics and the simple fact that journalists cannot be informed of what these missions are doing or, even if they were allowed to access this information, they could not be embedded with the special ops team because they simply could never keep up with the work load they would have to manage in order to stay with the team.
Wars that won’t be covered is obviously a powerful issue, the way the media can mold society’s support of the war stands within the balance of power in terms of media and military. We were given several other pieces of Hall’s point of view in political issues however, such as Obama and the media, which I am going to touch on now.
The transcript from the Fox News interview eventually fell into the issue of how the new President Elect has so easily charmed the media and how they seem to be embellishing his pros and ignoring his cons for the time being, and someone posed the question of when and if they media was going to turn on him. Hall’s logic in this area doesn’t get further explained within the article, she simply states that she believes he will get turned on by the media as they realize he won’t be the ultimate president they had all preened him to be and, while I feel it’s very true, it’s probably going to be the question I ask her. Feeling it’s true isn’t a basis of why it must happen and, considering her background in media, I am sure she could explain why it is inevitable for our new president to get turned on by those who lifted him up to his new pedestal.
Hall touched on several more issues in the other pieces. The sexism of the media in terms of Hillary Clinton and how that affected and propelled her campaign for one. Her comment of all women thinking “I’ve experienced that form of sexism” rang true within myself, and pity stirred for the collapsed Clinton campaign. Looking at the Gore piece, we see further how much the media impacts current politics (as well as past). The buddy-buddy Bush relationship with the media as opposed to the wary and distrustful relationship between Gore and the media had a powerful affect in that election. Hall presents several interesting points which all connect back into the larger issue of, how much power does the media wield over politics and society?
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