Controlling the Media is Necessary to Win and Prevent Wars (5 rounds)

(Sorry I took so long. Did some research.) If by "american standpoint" you mean that the "wars" in the topic are only wars that America has fought or will fight in, then that's fine. Makes my job easier as well. I will first talk about his individual points, then his general thesis, and finally provide my own independent reasons of why it is unnecessary to win and prevent wars. 1)"Wars" - I'm assuming this is here to make the difference between which wars we need to win and which ones we need to prevent. I'll accept that. Makes things easier. 2)"WW2" - You contradict yourself by saying it was a bad idea and worth the expenditures at the same time. I take the latter position, and say it was a good idea for the US to be involved with and ultimately end the war. Your argument here is that the media was tightly controlled, and therefore morale was high and the US won. However, this argument fails on three levels. A) I don't see any proof that the media was being censored. With all the other things that conspiracy theorists, the History Channel, and Wikipedia dig up, I have yet to read anything that said communication during WW2 between troops and people back home was tightly controlled. B) There is no link between "high morale" and "censored communication". C) We did not win because of high morale, we won because of the Manhattan Project. 3)"Understanding" - Ah, so this is your reason for why it is necessary. Well, before this argument can be true, you'll have to provide: an american example in which we SHOULD be at war, and DUE TO the right of free press, the American public wanted out of that war. (Or, you can provide a detailed hypothetical. Either one is fine with me.) Definition of should: obligated to do X action. 4) "S.A. War" - This, I'm assuming, is how you reach the second burden i placed upon you (preventing wars). From what I've looked up, the initial reason why the war started was because we were demanding Spain to give Cuba independence, and when the USS Maine was mysteriously blown up, a guy called Hearst blamed the Spanish government for it. You say that "here the power of the media was not controlled and a useless war was started." I agree that this was an unnecessary war. However, the governments of Spain and America themselves did not know what caused the war, and because of that the media is free to speculate. The media ought to have some restraint in and of itself, I agree, but it never works if the government attempts to impose control upon them. Sometimes they do recognize the matter however, so it's not necessary to control the media to prevent unnecessary wars. If freedom of speech and the press create situations where a person calls fire in a crowded theater, censoring of the freedom will only cause honest people and journalists to suspect that something is going on. 5) "Vietnam" To start off, I vehemently disagree that this was a necessary war. We supposedly entered the war because the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy were being fired upon. This is now known to be false, and was just President Johnson leading us into an unnecessary war. This by itself already disproves your attempt to use this example to prove your third burden (winning wars), because we weren't supposed to be in it. If you want this argument to stand, you'll have to prove that we had an overriding obligation to be there. But even if you overlook this... I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. You say that "the media told the american public what they wanted to hear, which is stop fighting and make more money". This is wrong on three levels. A) The media didn't do that. All (I know is that) they videotaped the things happening in Vietnam and reported how many died every week or so. B) You don't show how the media was doing that to the American public. C) War creates employment, employment creates money. Having no war means less employment, leading to less money. The last argument you make is that "US pull[ing] out of vietnam prematurely that in retrospect was a mistake." I believe this is wrong, AGAIN. We had no obligation to be there in the first place; we shouldn't be involved in other nation's affairs when they don't want us to be. Even if you don't believe that, even if you believe that we are supposed to be the world hegemon and police, the attack on our destroyers was a farce, and EVEN IF you don't believe that it was staged, there is NO REASON that PT boats firing on Destroyers should lead to a full-fledged war. And EVEN IF you don't believe THAT, America leaving the war was a good idea. Soldiers were dying every day, and for no purpose other than, supposedly, to help South Vietnam gain its independence. Well, according to Eisenhower.... >>>'The US diplomatically blocks Vietnamese elections because "80% would vote for Communist, Ho Chi Minh." -Memoirs of Dweight D Eisenhower, 1965 My own personal thoughts can be summarized by Mike Gravel at a previous presidential debate before he started being corporately censored and taken out of the public eye. >>>You can now, John, go to Hanoi, and get a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone. That's what you can do. And now we have most favored nation trade! What did all these people die for? -Mike Gravel Well, you tell me. Otherwise this is not an example of why we need to control the media. 7) "Burden" - "i will admit defeat if you can provide examples where the power of the media was used for the greater good and not for the gain of profit in times of war. there will always be outliers so we both need to look at general pasterns of the data." Since I am starting my case, I will respond to this now. Throughout your own case you attempt to prove the value of "security/saving lives" and in your summary you explicitly say "to win a [necessary] war the public needs to be kept oblivious to the horrors that it is." However, I don't see any reason why security and war is necessarily linked to saving lives, and why informing the public of the horrors of war is not. First of all, the obvious: War does not save lives. You cannot possibly achieve the value of saving lives if peace does not take any. "Security" is something I don't see you linking in to. But even if you DO link into it, even if I DID miss something.... the whole notion that we should keep the public oblivious and fight wars is appalling. Throughout your case you mention necessary and unnecessary when describing a war: But who's to say when a war is necessary or not? The definition cannot be used here, because we are only able to measure if theres more pros than cons or vice versa is AFTER the war has ended. Your definition says "more pros than cons" and your the burden you place on me is "making the greater good". I believe that when it comes to weighing if it is necessary to control the media, we ought not weigh its effects on the war at hand, but its effects on the people. The source of whether a war's initial reason is necessary or not ought to come from the people. Since we cannot weigh if we're going to have a "good" war or a "bad" war before we have it, the public ought to be informed. If we're in a war, the public should STILL be informed, so that when they want us to pull out, it is legit. There is no other way of weighing if we should be in a war or not: We have a moral imperative to NOT control the media. You say that "to win a [necessary] war the public needs to be kept oblivious to the horrors that it is", but if the public is kept oblivious, who's deciding if we're supposed to be in the war or if it's necessary? Who's telling us? If the public wants OUT, then we should NOT be in the war. It's that simple! Ran out of space; my bad. More case explanation in R3.