Pundits in Their Pockets -- A Peek at Pentagon PsyOps and Message Control
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 04/21/2008 - 4:06pm. AnalysisA BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Christine Bowman
Here's a story to ponder while waiting for the PA election returns to trickle in Tuesday night. This one's bigger than politics; it's Constitutional. Put the cable pundits on mute for awhile and look instead at how they've been covering stories from the Pentagon.
David Barstow and his team at The New York Times dug deep into some Freedom of Information Act documents to come up with a dramatic expose of Bush Administration manipulation of public opinion on Iraq, Gitmo human rights issues, and Donald Rumsfeld's performance as Secretary of Defense. Barstow documents that the administration selected people, mostly ex-military, to "catapult the propaganda" by going directly from meetings with Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon to the microphones of big media with a set of administration talking points in hand. Outlets including CNN, Fox News, ABC and CBS, to name just a few, uncritically provided them with same-day opportunities to sell the Pentagon view to Americans while posturing as independent experts and pundits on major news programs. Pentagon staffers also helped two Fox analysts write "their" OpEd for publication in The Wall Street Journal. The Pentagon called these folks "message force multipliers."
Selected by the Bush administration, and paid as pundits on the nightly news, some of these mouthpieces benefited financially, too, as defense industry lobbyists who had been granted special access to Pentagon players who influence the awarding of contracts. Cozy, all around.
The White House has been caught previously blurring the lines between PR and public manipulation in a variety of ways. By controlling access to the President and other top officials (in Jeff Gannon's case) and even paying journalists directly to promote administration viewpoints (Armstrong Williams was paid to promote No Child Left Behind), they've made a mockery of separation between government sources and journalistic outlets.
Take time to read the original investigative article; or go to the NY Times multimedia page dealing with the "generals' revolt" against Rumsfeld in 2006; or look at the insights of some truly independent Internet analysts.
Then let your news sources know how you feel about them.
Resources:
Message Machine:
How the Pentagon Spread Its Message (NY Times)
“MindWar”: The Bush Propaganda Machina (feministe.us)
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