We Asked An Expert Why Soldiers Were Marching So Badly In Trump's Military Parade, And Her Reasoning Makes Sense

[douglas9]

If you've seen any clips going viral from the event, you've likely noticed that many soldiers were marching out of sync with one another, or generally appeared to have pretty low energy, certainly not what one imagines when they conjure the image of a strongman military parade. It led to some speculating that the marching (or lack thereof) may have been a form of political protest.

So, I spoke to Charlotte Clymer, an activist and DC-based writer, who covered the topic in her Substack "Charlotte's Web Thoughts." She served in the US Army from 2005–2012, including three years in the 3rd US Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard). Of her time in the Old Guard, she said, "I probably did hundreds of parades and various ceremonies, to say nothing of all the funerals that we carried out in Arlington National Cemetery. Beyond the actual missions, we were doing training all the time. We're talking 1000s of hours of drilling, marching, and various preparations for those ceremonies."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/natashajokic1/trump-military-parade-marching-explained

[yourout]

1. You can damn well bet it was a protest march and right now..

Somebody in the Trump regime is scouring the video deciding who they can punish.

[cmmngrnd]

2. Completely Off Topic Mini-Rant

I never worked in journalism professionally, but in my school days (so many, many days ago!) we were taught that a good journalist puts a summary of the key topics in the first paragraph, and then expands the topic and provides context and detail in the following paragraphs. The idea was to allow the hurried reader to get the critical pieces of information without having to read the entire article. In this case, if the headline is promising to tell us this person's opinion as to why those soldiers were marching so shabbily, then dammit put it in the first paragraph.

That writing style is designed to inform. Today's writing style is designed to get clicks. The payoff for whatever a headline is advertising goes deep in the article, with the reader typically having to wade through several paragraphs of context, or sometimes just words vaguely related to the main topic, before getting to the point. This writing style is designed to embed the payoff deep enough so that it won't appear in short summaries like the one above, and commonly used in social media and news aggregation sites. You click on posts presumably because you want to learn about whatever the headline is promising, but to do that you have to go to the source site. Once on the site, you have to stay longer to get to the point, increasing site "engagement" metrics.

Sometimes the article never fulfills the promise of the headline, but we can write that off to bad editors as the editors, not the article's author, often write the headline.

It is a self-serving writing style composed more to bring in revenue than inform quickly and with precision.

If you've not noticed this before, you won't be able to stop noticing, and I'm sorry. : - /

Lastly, this is absolutely not a criticism of the OP author or any members of the highly informative and vibrant DU.

[mopinko]

4. it's all about the clicks now.

it’s crazy.

[Wonder Why]

7. Right on. But almost all the real jounalists are gone anyway.

[Baitball Blogger]

3. Go Army! My dad would have been proud.

[Ray Bruns]

5. Trump's just pissed that he can't shoot anyone not showing enough enthusiasm, yet.

[Alice Kramden]

6. Good article

Thanks for posting