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Auxiliary
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: CA, USA
Posts: 72
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AP story on Yon
There's an old saying: "Freedom of the Press belongs to those that own the Press." That may no longer be true.
Mainstream media holds disdain for 'amateur' journalists such as Michael Yon. Corporate journalism's snobbery, fear of competition and declining readership create a dismissive view of "bloggers". Two years ago, the web-log phenomena was been seen as a soon-to-pass fad.
Perhaps that's changing now that anyone can 'own' an database driven 'Press':
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WINTER HAVEN, Fla. (AP) - He didn’t have to go, it wasn’t his
job and nobody paid him to do it. But Michael Yon says he went to
Iraq because he wanted to see for himself what was happening in the
war zone.
The 41-year-old former Green Beret and author was embedded as a
freelance journalist with troops last year and used an Internet
blog to report on car bombs, firefights and fallen soldiers. He
also wrote about acts of compassion and heroism, small triumphs in
the country’s crawl toward democracy and the gritty inner workings
of the military.
Yon’s dispatches have been extolled by readers as gutsy and
honest reporting. His blog has been quoted by major newspapers and
TV news networks, and he has drawn comparisons to Ernie Pyle, the
World War II correspondent who shared the trenches with fighting
soldiers.
Yon followed the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment through
battles against insurgents in Mosul. The unit, which is based at
Fort Lewis, Wash., is known as the “Deuce Four.”
“Deuce Four is an overwhelmingly aggressive and effective unit,
and they believe the best defense is a dead enemy,” Yon wrote in
one dispatch. “They are constantly thinking up innovative, unique
and effective ways to kill or capture the enemy; proactive not
reactive.”
In May, a poignant photo he shot of a soldier cradling a dying
Iraqi girl after an explosion brought more attention to Yon’s
mission of telling the world about the war.
He crossed the line from observer to participant at one point.
During a firefight in downtown Mosul in August, Yon and
witnesses say he picked up a rifle, reloaded and fired three times
at insurgents as two battalion leaders lay wounded nearby. His
actions brought a stern reprimand from the Army.
Yon’s blog is unflinchingly pro-military, but he has frequently
criticized Army public affairs officers over how news out of Iraq
is managed. He hasn’t shied away from describing the horrors of
war, and he once wrote about an Iraqi taxi driver killed by U.S.
troops during a fire fight.
“They know I don’t follow the party line,” says the
soft-spoken Yon, whose broad, solid physique makes him seem taller
than 5 feet 6 inches. “Like when our guys get killed, I’ll write
about it and I’ll write about it the way it really happened, which
sometimes is pretty graphic.”
Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, a Deuce Four commander wounded in the
downtown Mosul battle, says Yon was effective because he stayed
with the unit longer than most embedded reporters.
“Mike, by spending five months with us, understood the unit,
the idiosyncrasies, the good and the bad, and how we made
decisions,” Kurilla says. “You don’t get that from coming in for
48 or 72 hours.”
A native of Winter Haven in central Florida, Yon is a
professional adventurer of sorts. His tales range from establishing
a vending business in Poland to tracking cannibals in India, all
after serving five years in the Army in the 1980s. In 2000, he
self-published a memoir called “Danger Close.”
Yon went to Iraq a year ago, began blogging a few weeks later
and gained a strong Internet following within a few months. In the
last four months of 2005, his site logged around 1.5 million hits.
Not being a journalist by trade, Yon says he initially had
trouble being an objective observer when the explosions and gunfire
started.
“In the beginning I would just help people, and I wouldn’t get
any photos,” he said. “I realized that I could do a lot more with
my camera and my pen than I could with my hands, and so I
disciplined myself to just stay out of the way and photograph,
unless somebody really, really needs me.”
AP-WS-02-06-06 1940EST
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