A bunch of us have debated that point. As PAOs, we're spokespeople for the military. All the time. It's our job to ensure the American public is informed about how we're using their tax money domestically and abroad. We work hard to ensure the entire story is told, and that something other than gloom and doom makes it into the public information sphere.
Most (not all, most) reporters are out there to genuinely chronicle news, not present a particular perspective of world events. Unfortunately, the most observable stories are often not positive, so what's reported skews to the negative even without editorial agenda.
IED explosions...civilian casualties...these are legitimate news stories, and our media is right to report them. Service members building schools (or helping secure areas so NGOs and local contractors can build them), providing medical care to impoverished civilians, defending law and order in neighborhoods, and yes, killing or capturing bad guys, also are legitimate news stories.
Unfortunately, the former category is a hell of lot easier for reporters to find and so gets reported a lot more often, which creates an inaccurate picture of the world in a war zone. The "good news" is often more behind-the-scenes, or requires additional explanation. That's where we come in.
So, yeah, we're out there trying to tell the "good" story. But contrary to professional myth, we don't (or shouldn't) "spin." We don't mislead. We provide open, honest, as-complete-as-possible-within-the-limitations-of-operational-security-and-evolving-situation-reports information about the negative, as well.
If we screw up, we're going to be truthful about it. Our rules that bind us to truth and accuracy unfortunately slow us down, and we're not always as fast with our information as the bad guy is with his propaganda, but we're not in the business of covering things up.
That said, we're also not in the business of public self-flagellation. Organizations have bugs that have to be worked out -- the military is no different from any business in that respect. And we do a pretty good job of learning from our mistakes and getting better over time. And just like every organization, we fix most of our problems internally. Most issues are not "news," or a matter of public need to know. (And no, I'm not talking about the major scandals or egregious misconduct). And if every single minor negative thing were publicly reported, it would create a very inaccurate picture of military operations, since similar positive stories are NOT going to be told. (For example, when was the last time you saw a headline that said "Servicemember didn't steal office supplies?")
Which brings up the dilemma PAOs debate while drinking. If I'm a spokesperson for an organization, charged with telling our story and creating an accurate big picture, can I write a personal blog that's worth reading? Because the interesting blogs are the ones that tell an individual's story, or a bigger story from a single person's perspective, and they tend to be warts-and-all accounts, and I'm not sure I haven't sacrificed that right when I accepted appointment as a PAO.
As a reservist deployed on rather short notice, rather unexpectedly, I most definitely have days where I'm not particularly thrilled with DoD. And as a person living temporarily in a war zone, odds are good that I'm going to have days where the frustrations of fairly austere living conditions are going to be past my threshold for tolerance. And as a person working in a newly created organization that undoubtedly will experience growing pains as it gets started, I'm sure to be vexed sometimes by things that could be done better. But if I write about them publicly, am I contributing to an inaccurate overall perception?
I'm still figuring that out. Hence this blog experiment. We'll see how it goes.
The first bunch of posts are being posted at once, well after the events I'm writing about. I wrote a bit while in training at Ft. Jackson, but didn't have the bandwidth to post. So, those'll be up shortly. Going forward, I'm hoping to be a little more current.
I'm not going to post a lot of personally identifying information here. If you want to see more personal pictures, please "friend" me on Facebook or email me and I'll add you to my Shutterfly albums. Assuming I know you, of course.
Thanks for reading!
