Stripes

The full "newstand" version of the Middle East Stars and Stripes - the newspaper available to the troops in the combat zone, is available in pdf format online.

Has been for a long time. You can read some background and policy information on the publication here.

Stars and Stripes is a daily newspaper published for the U.S. military, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families. Unique among the many military publications, Stars and Stripes operates as a First Amendment newspaper, free of control and censorship.
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Currently, our Mideast Edition is command-sponsored and distributed at no charge to downrange troops.
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Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, Stars and Stripes has published a Mideast edition. The pass-along rate is usually higher for deployed troops; a copy of Stars and Stripes may be read by as many as seven different people. The number of copies printed varies with the number of troops. At the end of 2004, we circulated 42,000 copies in Iraq, 13,000 in Kuwait, 600 in Qatar, and 3,000 in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

As wartime military staff began returning to the States, the newspaper began replacing them with a full-time civilian staff. Gradually they built a top-of-the-line team of professional journalists and newspaper business people, augmented by a small contingent of military journalists and managers.

In addition to the stories filed by our own reporters, daily issues can include content from the Associated Press, Knight-Ridder, Scripps-Howard, the Washington Post and other news services.

Stars and Stripes is a Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper distributed overseas for the U.S. military community. Editorially independent of interference from outside its editorial chain-of-command, it provides commercially available U.S. and world news and objective staff-produced stories relevant to the military community in a balanced, fair, and accurate manner. By keeping its audience informed, Stars and Stripes enhances military readiness and better enables U.S. military personnel and their families stationed overseas to exercise their responsibilities of citizenship. -- Revised DoD Directive 5122.11

How well do they do their job? You be the judge.

Here's the cover of the February 23 issue - the day after the shrine bombing in Sammara. Looks like the front page was already set up when the news broke. But just inside on page 3 are all the details, from an Associated Press story that probably ran in your local paper too.

By the following day the front page was given over to reports of the subsequent violence. Inside you'll find another page 3 AP story with the details - including pictures of the devastated shrine.

You'll find a story filed by a Stripes reporter too. "Insurgents control many perilous rural roads" is the headline on that one.

The next day the drama continues to unfold, and the AP reports: Iraq's most influential Shiite political leader called Friday for Sunni-Shiite unity as religious figures sought to calm passions and pull the nation from the brink of civil war...

If you're a fan of the funny pages you can read Beetle Bailey. If you prefer, the Doonesbury strip in this issue pursues a plotline about a character who lost his legs in Iraq.

The next day a deal is announced, but the page 3 story, this time from the Washington Post, is headlined: "More than 50 Iraqis are killed despite effort to curb violence."

Note the above the banner headline too; "Kerry leads Democrat's push for bigger troop pay increases". Good for him!

An AP headline elsewhere in the issue says that the "U.S. gives mixed report on Iraqi army readiness." (That sounds right to me. At this point I believe they are "summer soldiers" - summer soldiers, summer not.)

A couple of days passed with other topics in the front page headlines, but then the Washington Post published their claim of 1300 dead, and the Stars and Stripes featured it prominently.

Did the Stars and Stripes provide accurate coverage of events? Probably more so than most other publications - certainly far better than the NY Times. But that's my opinion - since each of the images are linked to the full paper you can read them and decide for yourself.

Our coverage of the media coverage can be read here and here.

That was just introduction - now our story really begins. There are several lessons to be learned from this tale, a cautionary story of how fast bad information can travel far.

Dreadcow is a fine milblogger, one of our favorites currently in Iraq. He's a grunt, and he travels outside the wire. He knows how things are in his part of the world, and he tells it like he sees it.

In a recent post he told about a phone conversation with his parents in the States:

Parents: "Well, everyone misses you. People ask about you all the time and how you're doing. Your Dad is sick right now. The weather is miserable; it's below zero in Minneapolis right now. Iraq almost fell into civil war today. You sure you want to buy a truck with these gas prices? When you get home we'll get you wasted on Margaritas.

"Me: "Come again?"

Parents: "Oh, I was saying with gas prices over two bucks a gallon, are you sure you want to get a truck?"

Me: "No, the civil war part."

That was the first I'd heard about the mosque getting blown up and this was two or three days after it happened. I'm IN Iraq and have no idea what's going on.

Now, stop and think a moment, and you'll realize one possible reason why the guy actually in Iraq didn't know there was a civil war in Iraq: Because there isn't one. Violence? You bet. Death? Many every day. Civil War? Seems to me that's the kind of thing you notice in your neighborhood long before you hear about it in an overseas phone call or read it in the newspaper.

But Dreadcow chose to vent his anger at what he believed was the cause of his lack of information:

A few months back I came to the conclusion that I'm fed nothing but propaganda and now it seems like my theory is dead on. I was always skeptical about the paper around here, Stars and Stripes. It's the newspaper for soldiers that's published by the military and widely available overseas.
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I usually skim through the paper over dinner, directing everyone else to the humor I find in the blatant propaganda articles. I've explained to ya'll before that if new schools and water plants and all that stuff is going up, I have no idea. I'm a trigger puller. I watch for blow-me-up devices and people running around with guns (oh, if only you could have seen the boy no older than ten walking around the streets toting an AK) and worry about my legs being blown off.

But the way our media talks about the war it sounds like a stroll through Candy Land. A hot, dusty, ghetto Candy Land. The muffin man lives in downtown Baghdad in a mud house that has a plastic tarp for a door and in his spare time watches bakery porn on satellite television.

Now you've already seen the Stripes coverage of events of those days - they told the story. But bear in mind that distribution of the paper to every corner of Iraq may not always be rapid. (I was somewhere around Baghdad and I saw it daily and on time - free copies were available for the taking at the DFAC.) And although he has access to the internet, that might not be daily either. For whatever reason, Dreradcow exercised his God-given right to vent.

And somehow that post came to the attention of some of the folks who aren't quite so quick on the uptake.

Center for Media and Democracy:

A soldier who blogs from Iraq is upset that he didn't hear the country was on the brink of civil war until he happened to phone home to his parents.

Dreadcow, a soldier in Iraq, tells the story of (his words, not mine) "[being] fed nothing but propaganda." I quote him at length, the story is powerful:

Alternet posts this story from a soldier in Iraq called: There's a civil what? where? The soldier heard about it through his mother.

In fact, he made a fairly big splash among the true believers. The conclusions these folks draw is that Bush's evil propaganda is so powerful that even people in Iraq don't know about the civil war in Iraq!

Let's recap our story thus far.

1. Parent in America tells son in Iraq that there is a civil war in Iraq. (We assume parent heard this from TV or newspaper.)
2. Son actually in Iraq, who had no idea that there was a civil war there but has faith in his mom, blames his newspaper and vents his anger on his blog.
3. Lefty bloggers find his post, and determine it offers proof of evil Bush plan to keep soldiers stupid, and is further proof of civil war in Iraq. They never question why he didn't notice the civil war. It doesn't occur to them that he has obvious access to the internet and the wealth of information thereon, and they never bother to take a look at the Stars and Stripes. Such annoying facts don't fit their point.

But the story doesn't end there. Because enough of them visited Dreadcow's blog that he noticed. And if you thought he was angry at S&S, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

But when I checked out the links provided in the comments section to see how my writing was being portrayed I was totally livid. Number one, most people are cordial enough to ask me whether they can link to my site or not, and usually I oblige them. There have been a few cases where I haven't but for the most part I let people do it and I don't like it they'll get an email. Second, if I wanted my writing to take stances on political issues I'd flat out do it, and I'd do it blatantly as I'm not one for bullshit. Third, it's totally unacceptable and insulting when people take my writing and turn it into something other than what it is.
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I could get all in depth but that would be a waste of my time and yours, so I'll make it simple. In "Propaganda" I did a little ragging on the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes for its choice of articles it publishes. I wrote a humorous (from what people tell me), exaggerated, and totally fake conversation between some Fobbits precluded by the description of "imaginary."

I don't know where these commie nut jobs got the idea that I was saying Stars and Stripes was a tool of the vast right wing conspiracy. I just said I was insulted by the idea of not getting the whole story. However, if you recall, I also ripped on CNN and Fox News for how they slant their news. Someone please explain to me how the fuck I could take a political stance when denouncing everybody and their monkey uncle.

So you can bet I was pretty pissed off when I find out that my blog entry "Propaganda" was used by two separate political websites for their own gain. I never authorized them to use my writing and I emailed the administrators of both websites, politely asking them to remove what writing of mine they used. During the composition of this entry they have yet to comply with my wishes.

Nor will they ever. And they certainly aren't going to acknowledge that later post.

As I said before, there are lessons to be learned from this.

1. Bad news travels faster than the speed of thought.

2. While you should always listen to your mother you don't have to tell the world what she says.

3. If you want a great grunt's-eye view of Iraq, read Fun With Hand Grenades.

4. If you want a great balance of both good and bad news from Iraq, read Stars and Stripes.