NYT Proves Pentagon Media PSYOP
Its official. Pentagon money and influence were going into keeping up the desired spin in the US news media. Everything you ever suspected is true. "Military analysts," you know, those guys who are always on the news cheerleading for whatever war the POTUS has started now, were practically on the payroll.
NYT:
Message Machine
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: April 20, 2008
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
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(11 more pages at the link...)
In an editorial, the Boston Globe says it better than I ever could:
Propaganda at home
April 22, 2008
ANYONE who has watched the military analysts hired by TV networks has heard rosy assessments of the war in Iraq. The similarities between their judgments and the Pentagon's are not coincidental. As The New York Times demonstrated by suing the Pentagon to obtain 8,000 pages of documents, those analysts were enlisted by the Defense Department in a psychological warfare operation targeting the domestic audience. And, as the newspaper reported Sunday, many of the retired military officers appearing on news shows were using their access to the Pentagon and the airwaves to procure lucrative contracts for some 150 defense contractors, which employed them as consultants, board members, lobbyists, or executives.
This is no subtle attempt to influence public opinion. It is a government program to corrupt the free flow of information that serves, in a healthy democracy, to inoculate the public against official lies, bad policy, and misbegotten wars.
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This is a tactic more suitable for Vladimir Putin's Russia. In fact, the Pentagon's manipulation of the media has been more deft than the Kremlin's because it was better hidden.
In the end, the government's disguised lies have done more damage to American democracy and the national interest than to any foreign enemy. History's epitaph for the Pentagon's psywar operation will be: "We fooled ourselves."
Media Matters has more on the subject here.
Score one for this blog. We've been saying that domestic PSYOPS are selling wars to our people for 10 years now. It wasn't really much of an accomplishment, though. When your nose tells you that something is rotten, it nearly always is.
