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The Fog of War
There’s a lot of propaganda on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia war, and it’s hard to know what’s real. I had the same problem during the Russian war in Afghanistan.
Circa 1986, CBS aired an hour-long program about Afghanistan which had footage of a supposed nighttime fight between Soviet tanks and Mujahideen. The footage seemed to be too good. I wondered if a cameraman would take such risks. In 1993, I attended a conference on World War 1. Historian David Isby mentioned that he had covered the war. I’m asked him about this program. He knew the people who had faked it and said they were amused that they had fooled Dan Rather.
This reinforces the point that we need to be skeptical about the videos from this war.
Published in Military
But what if it shows me what I want to see?
Yes.
Then there’s the reporter and camera-person showing how a mortar attack kills a Ukranian family. No fog of war there.
I don’t think the day-to-day news releases matter except that they keep the situation in the front of people’s mind.
What Putin has done–invaded a country that posed no threat to him and destroyed the lives of millions of people–can be described in a sentence. The civilized world needs to get Putin to stop, and they need to bill Russia for the cost of rebuilding Ukraine.
The real danger here is that the war will become a way of life and the press will describe it as a civil war. The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to fix.
Nothing new under the sun. Once upon a time there was some integrity in the industry, perhaps (although Katie did give it away…”best laid plans of mice and men”).
Wow, Dan Rather-aka Hairdo, was fooled!
Yeah, exactly.
It was Richard Feynman who said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
I heard that and I said no, it’s Dan Rather.
By the way, this quote has come to mind a lot over the last couple weeks.
There has been a lot of talk on Ricochet about not believing the media reports coming out of Ukraine. I haven’t watched a single newscast or news report on this war, yet I think I’ve learned more about it than any other war during my lifetime. (As a rule I never watch or listen to news broadcasting). It looks to me like this is the most photographed and videotaped war in history. Forget the journalists. Civilians on the ground with cell phones are providing more information than 1,000 news organizations are able to disseminate. Add to this a multiplicity of Internet analysts and military experts.
Hillary Clinton:
“I scream. You scream. We all scream for Mujahideen!”
Dan Rather is rather good of making his own evidence for stories
David C. Isby, another game designer:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/692/david-c-isby/linkeditems/boardgamedesigner?pageid=1&sort=rank