Belgian State Television Discovers Milbloggers

I just watched tonight's 'TerZake' (translation: 'To The Point'), a current affairs show which airs just after the news on state TV channel Canvas here in Belgium. The show covers current affairs topics in a more in-depth way than the daily news can, because they only have two or three topics and they spend ten or more minutes on each segment.

Tonight one of their segments was about 'milblogs', i.e. military blogs: weblogs mostly written by U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines or airmen serving abroad. My interest was tickled: I have a few milblogs in my list of daily reads, and I was curious which ones they would focus on.

But my hopes were soon dashed: it was Canvas after all. Two actors, one man and one woman, read excerpts from two or three milblogs. The image alternated between the actors' faces and some extremely zoomed in excerpts of the blogs they were reading. The actors spoke Dutch, but the blogs clearly were in English.

Naturally all the stories they read were doom-and-gloom type of stories: how security was terrible for Iraqis, how paranoid they were becoming themselves, how many soldiers wanted to vote for Kerry because he would get them home sooner and of course some regular moaning and bitching about having to to PT-tests in a "combat zone". Or they would read excerpts about blowing up a house and how cool that was, making the soldier sound like some kind of adolescent vandal.

Like old media do when they report a story, they neglected to give the URLs. Based on the "PT tests" quote on screen I managed to google up that they were reading from a blog called My War, more precisely this article. Of course, if you check out recent articles from this blog you see it's been endorsed by Jello Biafra...

There was at least one other blog, possibly two. Any Belgian readers who also saw the program care to figure out which ones they were?

Any milbloggers out there who want to point out some other blogs they should have quoted? Here's their e-mail: terzake@canvas.be.

Comments

[Anouk]

I think 'ter zake' is one of the best programs on Belgian Television. I am a Belgian, living in the USA now and I really miss seeing a more in depth news covering.