Many observers look to the early moments of 9/11 as a key point where blogs took major strides in gaining increased legitimacy. As mainstream news sources buckled under intense traffic, worried people across the nation turned to blogs like Scripting News and Slashdot, who began gathering and linking to news from sources across the Internet – from varying wire reports, dispatches straight from the street, and updates posted on other blogs – to provide users with up to the minute news on what was happening. At the end of the day, Dave Winer wrote, “[Today] there were real-time human touches that are hard to capture in a print pub with a lead time. There's power in the new communication and development medium we're mastering. Far from being dead, the Web is just getting started.”

The recent Iraqi conflict provided a unique opportunity to study how blogs participated in and affected discussions of social issues. I found that in much the same way that cable news cut their teeth on the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War saw blogs emerge within the mainstream consciousness as viable complements (and sometimes alternatives) to traditional news sources.

In the long and uncertain run-up to war, as major domestic news media outlets churned out less than stellar coverage of ongoing events, online users turned to foreign media and informed bloggers to tell them what was new, what was relevant, what stories were being spun, and to put the latest news into the greater overall context. For instance, when broadcast news chose to largely ignore massive global anti-war protests, curious people logged onto blogs that chronicled the protests from both sympathetic and antagonistic viewpoints. Or when the State Department decided to sellout Kurds in Northern Iraq to Turkey, critical blogs were there to condemn the move while pro-administration voices placed blame on Turkey. In essence, weblogs were successful in cultivating informed discussion between parties that were clearly heavily divided over this issue. "Warblogging" emerged as a term in the mainstream media, as greater attention began to be paid to the sophistication and depth of information found on blogs that could not be found in traditional media.

Pundits

Besides the usual cadre of opinion journalists like Sullivan, Marshall, Reynolds, etc. there were a number of warbloggers who constantly scoured media reports to find tidbits of information that they felt were important. These included sites like www.dailykos.com, www.tacitus.org, and www.vodkapundit.com. The epicenter of warblogging however seemed to be Blogs of War, a site that is not only constantly updated, but contains links to more than 120 different blogs that presumably deal with war issues.

Personal Accounts

A new development, though, was the emergence of first-person accounts that illucidated life on both sides of the gun. A blog describing trips to the market, national holidays, and satellite television would be horribly mundane if not for the fact that the posts were coming from inside Baghdad. Where is Raed? became a hugely popular blog written by Salam Pax (“peace” in two languages) because it gave life and character to the ongoing situation beyond military press briefings and grainy video of dessert. Pax spoke towards the war debate with an authority and credibility that few others in the online community possessed. In one post, he rants about the apparent inanities in the ongoing debate:

"No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying “come on bomb us” it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case."

He continues:

"Do support democracy in Iraq. But don’t equate it with war. What will happen is something that could/should have been avoided. Don’t expect me to wear a [I heart bush] t-shirt. Support democracy in Iraq not by bombing us to hell and then trying to build it up again (well that is going to happen any way) not by sending human shields (let’s be real the war is going to happen and Saddam will use you as hostages), but by keeping an eye on what will happen after the war."

In the opening days of the war, Pax described the bombings (“To day [sic] the B52s took off at 3pm, on half an hour we will know whether it is Baghdad tonight or another city.”) and how citizens had responded thus far. His last post came four days into the war, before presumably losing his Internet connection.

There are also blogs written by soldiers on the frontlines. Begun by troops to keep their families updated on their situations, they soon became popular with online readers who wanted to know more about what the soldiers are going through. The most popular is one written by an American army reservist going by the pseudonym Lt Smash (www.lt-smash.us). He relates personal anecdotes and writes about the terrible food and the oppressive weather, but his posts occasionally grow somber when they eulogize the lost.

Both of these blogs are twists on the typical manner in which they are used. They are clearly nothing more than online journals - there is no news gathering or analysis - but in the context of the war, their lives add to the collective knowledge of the entire situation.

Journalist Accounts

A further sign that blogs have entered the mainstream is their increased use by major news outlets. MSNBC now publishes weblogs, including the highly regarded political writings of Mickey Kaus and a blog written by the wife of a deployed Army officer. The BBC had a rolling weblog of all correspondents while other newspapers made concerted efforts to put correspondent dispatches online before longer stories were prepared for the next day's print edition.

Kevin Sites, a CNN correspondent, maintained a blog chronicling his experiences in Iraq until he was asked to stop, presumably by CNN and presumably because they did not want him reporting for anyone else - including himself.

Christopher Allbritton eliminated any chance that he would be faced with that problem by entering Iraqi Kurdistan as a solo news operation. His weblog, Back to Iraq 2.0, solicited donations to help fund travel costs and expenses that include a $1.50-a-minute satellite phone through which he connects to the Internet and updates his blog with posts that blend elements of reporting and personal journaling. His stated mission is to interview Kurds about their aspirations for nationhood and to gauge their opinion on the ongoing war.

"At one rest break, Abdullah filled us in on his view of world politics. “George Bush: Okaaaaaay!” he said, and gave a big thumbs up. Tony Blair got the same treatment. “Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condeleeza RIce,” he said, ticking off their names on his fingers. “Bosch!” But he literally held his nose and sneered when he came to the names of French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. He even found it in his heart to dis France’s ambassador to the United Nations.
He asked if J. and I had children. We didn’t but he did. He had five, he said. But then he started ticking them off again. The first one was killed by the Turks. The second by the Iranians. The third by the Syrians and the fourth by the Iraqis. For all the death Abdullah has seen personally, he seemed remarkably unbitter. But he was a full-on, “let’s roll” supporter of this war.
“Saddam, krrreeeeeek!” he said, and made a slicing motion across his throat. “Amrika, Kurdi dost!” he said, indicating the friendship that existed between the Kurds and the United States. I felt such compassion for him at the moment, I wanted to hug him. Instead, I patted his arm and nodded. “Friends,” I said. I desperately hoped I wasn’t lying to him." April 5, 2003.

Some of his Allbritton's colleagues worry that he won't be able to survive with such limited resources, but his experiment will have a certain amount of success if he can travel into a no-man's land of telecommunications and prove that a computer, satellite phone, and weblog can provide adequate distributional power when compared to the huge resources of a corporate-owned entity like CNN.

Analysis

Andrew Sullivan suggests that the main advantage of blogs is the speed with which they can act. "And because we're first, we can help frame and even in some cases lead the debate" (Rutten). In the same article, the dean of USC's Annenberg School for Communication posits that although the audience for opinion blogs is still relatively small, "it's an awfully influential audience, and the blogs have helped set the tone for that influential group's response to what's been going on."

All of the blogs and media sources combined to give readers a unified picture of what was happening during the war. Or did they? As Emily Bell noted, "You can have instant or, if you are prepared to wait, you can have accurate. But you cannot always have both at once." She gives as an example the reported fall of Umm Qasr. Wire services declare coalition victory only to be rebuffed hours later by British television; there are reports of an American flag being raised and then taken down; and a day after military officials have declared victory, news agencies are still reporting fighting (Bell).

Simply put, the promise that electronic sources would deliver better information has not come true. News and commentary blogs like Sullivan's are great at filtering and interpreting information, but they rarely provide any original content. On the other hand, the writings of Salam Pax and new sources like Al Jazeera's english-language website provide us with information that we may not be able to get anywhere else.

When there are countless numbers of blogs ready to put their spin on the same piece of data, how does one discover the truth? It all comes back to the original news gatherers on the ground, and their parent organizations have come up with new ways to provide timely content that can compete with the blogs, like the BBC's effective weblog of short reporter dispatches.

Though their overall analysis may have caused confusion, blogs performed valuable services in filtering and organizing the steady streams of information from around the world. They were arguably more valuable in the run-up to war, when blogs were uniquely suited to addressing the rancorous war debate. Weblogs thus proved their ability to act uniquely in taking advantage of the Internet to influence social climates.