Over at Contentions, Max Boot has some interesting thoughts on how military culture conflicts with effective press relations. It’s worth reading in full, but here’s a sample:

The conventional military mindset sees the media as a potential enemy to be shunned at all costs. Officers who get quoted too much are derided behind their backs as “glory-seekers” or “self-promoters.” The focus is always supposed to be on the team, not the individual, and there is a general assumption that good deeds will speak for themselves.

On the home front, public trust in information about the war, from both the military and the press, is, according to a recent Pew poll, spiraling downwards. And, perhaps more worrisome, institutional trust is increasingly split down party lines:

The vast majority of Republicans (73%) remain at least somewhat confident in the military’s portrayal of how the war is going, compared with just 32% of Democrats. At the outset of the war, the partisan gap was far less pronounced.
Conversely, Republican confidence in the accuracy of media reports on the war has declined more sharply. In March 2003, eight-in-ten Americans generally trusted press reports and opinions did not differ across party lines. Today, fewer than a third of Republicans (29%) feel confident in what they are hearing from the press, while about half of Democrats (51%) remain confident in the news from Iraq.

As Cliff May points out today, the war is a major dividing issue in our country right now. It’s going to be tough to reach even a rough national consensus on it no matter what, but that we can’t even agree on who to trust for information—and, as a result, what’s actually happening—only makes things more difficult.