We live in a day and age in which there have never been so many “citizen journalists”, which can be especially problematic in a war zone, because anyone with a cellphone and a social media account who are able to create or obtain images and videos of what is really going on can thus disseminate such to the general public. Of course, nation-states are in the business when it comes to war of strongly desiring to control the war narrative, which is why they have explicit as well as implicit agreements with mainstream media to stay within a given range when it comes to the narrative, typically reasoned as being necessary for the greater good, safety, and security of the population, at large. After all, the basic contention that those who make war have is that because war is hell, it’s not good for the people to see that hell, because they won’t be able to properly wrap their heads around how warfare is necessary and even righteous, even when it appears through their eyes not to be the case at all.
The bottom line is that because warfare is so brutal, violent, destructive, and inhumane, that to actually show the reality of warfare and how ugly it really is, in which there are few heroes and there are many villains, would be too overwhelming for the general public to accept. Further to the point, there are plenty of those in the highest positions of power and influence, who have no compunction whatsoever in telling bald-faced lies, to protect the guilty, because they believe it is necessary to first “win” the war, before such can be more fairly examined. It therefore becomes necessary to see all those who simply provide a narrative that exposes that war for what it really is, as a problem that needs to be silenced, and therefore to censor them.
The very first thing to die in any war is the truth of the war, because from the very beginning, those who are most intimately involved in the war are not interested in any pushback from anybody, and in particular, understand the value of having the narrative be molded and thereby controlled by those pro-warfare powers so that the general public will at a minimum, not be at odds with that war, which thus makes the pathway to continuing such warfare a heck of a lot more smoother, then when having to deal with a public up in arms about it.
Those then that are tasked with controlling the war narrative have their work cut out for them, because while at one time there were mainstream media outlets that might well question a war that by all appearances had gone off track, or seemed to have veered in the wrong direction, this isn’t so much an issue anymore, because those mainstream outlets are typically nowadays in lockstep with the war effort. Rather, it is those who are outside the mainstream that have made it their point to be a thorn in the side of those who conduct war, with their primary purpose to show the reality of what is going on, so that those with eyes to see can adjudge for themselves the humanity or inhumanity of what that war is or is not.