CONTACT: Lauren Kelly
Phone: 949-305-0020
Email: lkelly@usmilitary.tv
Website: www.usmilitary.tv
For immediate release
January 12, 2005

The Military Channel Wars Continue… and the Third One’s a Charm!

Orange County, CA

This week the Discovery Wings’ Military Channel and AETN’s The Military History Channel announced their launches, respectively. But what they didn’t know was that there is a third one on their “six” (a military aviation term meaning “aggressively coming up behind them”.) Their adversary is an unusual aggressor who is poised to capture the most important audience left behind.

The same viewer demographics which cling to hit shows like Fox’s The OC, are the very ones left out of the military channel wars. And that is exactly who U.S. Military Television Network (USMTV) is targeting. With programs like the game show that offers prizes such as 50,000 lbs of fuel to a winning squadron or a Zodiac boat to a special operations unit, to the show that sets current music to videos featuring the young crowd of today’s military doing what they do best – their jobs, USMTV is set to attract viewers the Pentagon would most like to reach.

Even with current assets from the guns of the two big network groups being fired into the TV viewing public, it’s not likely they will reach USMTV’s demographic nor match their lineup. U.S. Military Television Network, based in Southern California’s OC, is the brain child of CEO Lauren Kelly, a former entertainer in a U.S.O. type military entertainment troupe. “I’ve spent the last 15 years constructing this network from the ground up, and I am completely convinced that there is no other media outlet that has the knowledge and understanding of ‘who’ today’s military really is, and what our audience wants to see,” Kelly said in a statement on the heels of her rivals’ launch.

Kelly began creating her network after years of observing the military’s treatment by both the media and an uninformed public. “The only perception that the American public has of the U.S. Military is what has been fed to them by the media. Though the Gulf War in the early 1990s offered a glimpse into their lives, it was marred by reports – many of which were erroneous and skewed – of the Tailhook Scandal,” Kelly explained. “Even after embedding reporters with our units during Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was still more being reported about the lives of the embedded journalists than stories of military personnel actually fighting the war.” Kelly is confident that she has had the support of the military from the beginning because of her dedication to getting what she calls the real story out there. The military’s Public Affairs units are legally prohibited from promoting the military. But with a network like USMTV, Kelly can do it for them.

U.S. Military Television Network is set to launch in the fall of 2005. Funding for the planned 24 hour cable television network has delayed the long awaited launch of USMTV. But while the other two military-documentary-style networks battle over winning the 40 plus crowd, the third missile is about to be launched into the moshpit of generation X and beyond. Kelly boasted about her family of warriors, “The personnel that make up the U. S. Military are intelligent, funny and talented people. And now the rest of the world will see them up close and personal. Stand-by for launch!”

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Also, the military stuff on TV is designed to lure people into going into war. I bet there will be no examination about the dangers of becoming ein Reich, ein Fuehrer like Germany did in the past and America is doing today.

Knee-jerk media pacifists need to wake up and smell the inherent brutality of the real world.

Terrorists want to kill you and your children, perferably here at home.

The purpose of the Military Channel was not to glorify organized violence. Far from it. It was to “Militainment” at all. And to suggest this reveals the ignorance of the author.

Military Channel was about educating the people about the realities of war and how and why. And not in a condescending manner.

It’s disturbing that both you and Mr. O’Connor took this inocuous news as fodder for some conspiracy theory.

Ms. Lopez, maybe you can rent some documentaries about warfare and watch them with your son while you dicuss the meaning of patriotism.

I was trying to say that we are moving through our lives now with a constant subtext of war and violence in the background from our tv’s. Like a realtime war movie. But it’s largely pro-government, pro-corporation propaganda. And our kids and the people of Iraq are paying the ultimate price while we are dulled by images on our tv sets.

So while the previous poster makes a valid point about presenting history on tv, I have a seventeen year old son with whom I am struggling to get to have a realistic understanding of what war really is versus what he sees presented to him on tv: with graphics and music and breathless talking heads who are safely tucked away in studios.