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May 2, 2008
David Barstow in the New York Times disclosed how the Pentagon information apparatus has used friendly military analysts in a publicity campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. This group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.
David Barstow offered an unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon campaign, spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75 retired generals and other high military officers, almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors, were recruited as "surrogates." They were to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and messages") about the President's War on Terror and war in Iraq into every part of the media -- cable news, the television and radio networks, the major newspapers -- as their own expert "opinions."
These military analysts made tens of thousands of media appearances and also wrote copiously for op-ed pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert propaganda onslaught on the American people that lasted from 2002 until now.
Update: 3 May
Glenn Greenward at Salon is one of the few to address this issue explicitly. He says
In general, the establishment media almost completely excludes critiques of their own behavior, and discussions of the role the media plays in bolstering deceitful narratives is missing almost entirely from media-controlled discourse. One of the most significant political stories of this decade, if not this generation -- the media's full-scale complicity with the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war -- has never been meaningfully discussed or examined on any establishment television network, including cable shows.
He says that no fundamental critique of the role the media plays, the influence of its corporate ownership, its incestuous relationship with and dependence on government power -- among the most influential factors driving our political life -- are ever heard in the mainstream media. Greenwald adds:
Media companies simply freeze out -- try to render invisible -- any matters that reflect negatively on what they really do, what their true function is. They propagandize most vigilantly when it comes to stories revealing the true role they play in our political culture.
The mainstream media pretend that they are watchdogs for democracy when they are the lapdogs of the government and well-connected corporate interests.
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Gary
My last couple of posts are about his scandal. It hasn't had the attention it deserves. The mass media protecting their own perhaps. Or just plain embarrassment.