Journalists Turn in Access Badges, Exit Pentagon Rather Than Agreeing New Rules

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 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.

I'm honestly not sure which rules the media outlets actually want changed.

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-...

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.

Then you aren’t a journalist.

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.

The current mechanism is

1) Fringe theory gestates in the internet.

2) Fringe theory gets into the podcast network and is covered

3) Relatively famous personality comes on a Fox program and mentions the theory

4) Government figures repeats theory that was covered on the news

5) Fox repeats government coverage

People on the right who have alternative theories, simply do not get air time. They aren’t suppressed, they are simply not competitive.

In a more economic framing of their efforts - they have found a way to offset the costs of inaccurate content to the future.

So they are now able to “sell” cheap “junk food” content, while the center and left spends more effort in forming more accurate content.

The center and left publications, for all their flaws, still stick to journalistic norms.

But today the NYT is more a site dependent on its wordle revenue than its subscription revenue. Consolidation of markets means advertisers do not need smaller local newspapers, and platforms get the lions share of attention.

There is no business model to sustain a free information economy.

Really ? Here [1] they seem to say the same things.

[1] two different EU countries.

Basically the press claimed that the Spanish sabotaged a US navy ship called the USS Maine. The Maine had a boiler accident which caused it to explode but the press claimed it was the Spanish. The government used this as an excuse to take the remaining bits of Spain's empire away from them. So that might be an example of the press being 'an enemy of world peace'. No, I'm not sure the current media would do that. But it is an example of a free press starting a war to sell fish wrap.

You choose to keep at it because you think military stuff is pretty neat; you get paid by the view; getting briefings from the pentagon makes you seem important to yourself and others; and you like being a celebrity (albeit a very minor one)

So it's purely leaks.

Seems like the wrong way about it. If your own people are leaking information, you should fix that, not force the press not to report on it.

I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.