The Daily Universe
Producer: Evaluate Media
By Virginia Stratford - 13 Sep 2006

An award-winning LDS documentary film producer urged students to critically evaluate media messages at a lecture on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2006, at the Kennedy Center for International Studies.

"We are in a war of words," said Dodge Billingsley, founder of Combat Films and Research based in Salt Lake City. "Pay attention to everything you read and see. [The media] is designed to have an impact on you."

Billingsley's lecture, "The Info War: A Battle of Words and Images," specifically addressed the current war of harnessing words and images to create reality.

"Information operations is a bit like advertising and much unlike direct combat," said Billingsley, who guest lectures with the U.S. military in an effort to understand and control the dissemination of information. "If you take care of your adversary with a bullet, he is dead, or you render him incapable of fighting; you move on. If you drop a thousand fliers in a village, you don't know if the message got across. You don't see an immediate result."

Billingsley shared photographs taken in Iraq to explain how the media, particularly the Internet, does not accurately convey world issues.

Emerging from the Internet are "Squad Blogs," in which U.S. Armed Forces return from combat and record their experiences. Every soldier becomes a journalist: they are shaping ideas and influencing people, but their reporting may not be entirely accurate and may provoke further the war of words.

It is words themselves that are the battleground. In Iraq, U.S. forces are not allowed to use the word "democracy," but must use the word "freedom" instead. "Insurgents" are referred to only as "terrorists," and "diverse tactics" becomes "terrorism."

This strategy is a way of forming reality. Words provoke an emotional reaction, Billingsley said. How people feel becomes their reality. The same is true when issues of national security are conveyed. Small wonder that only certain words can be used in Iraq, where an entire nation's perspective is being influenced. It is a subject Billingsley is obsessively familiar with.

"Since 9/11 everyone in the United States has become much more aware of national security," said Cory Leonard, assistant director of the Kennedy Center, in an e-mail. "Dodge brings a unique, first-hand perspective mixed with the analytical training of national security studies."

Billingsley founded Combat Films and Research in 1997 and has traveled extensively in an effort to document security-related topics and worldwide conflicts.

"Film has the potential to reach more people," Billingsley said. "It's amazing to see somebody's perception of what happens in combat. What you see in the background and foreground is an interesting way to analyze what happened."

Billingsley's lecture is part of the Kennedy Center's Global Awareness Lecture Series featured every Wednesday.

"The lectures are an easy way to gain exposure to informed opinion from differing perspectives on the world," Leonard said. "[Global Awareness Lectures are] an interdisciplinary, international approach to understanding important issues, whether they are mixed in with globalization, markets, conflict, culture, geography, or history and most global issues are complex like that."

The next Global Awareness Lecture is "The Success of Smoke-free Initiatives" by Dagfinn Høybråtten, Norwegian minister of Labor and Social Affairs, at noon, Sept. 20, 2006, in 238 HRCB.