Pentagon Manipulates News Coverage

Hey it was the generic "you". It had nothing to do with you, personally. I guess I could have said: " I tend to think that the media...."

 

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/3470

no further comment from me required.

[rquoter]What The Times Was Up To
JOHN PODHORETZ - 04.20.2008 - 9:56 PM
Max Boot’s post earlier today about the preposterous New York Times story on the relationship between the Pentagon and former-military men-turned-war-pundits was spot on. I think, based on many years of experience working at various newspapers, that there is an explanation for the extreme length — 7800 words — of the story and the fact that it manages to find nothing more than an effort by the Pentagon to get good coverage. The Times thought it was on to something very big, ended up with something very small, and then took what little they had and tried to make a silk purse from the sow’s ear that was reporter David Barstow’s investigation.

I intuit that this story, which features extensive use of Freedom of Information requests, was originally conceived as an investigation of potentially criminal activity — specifically, whether the Pentagon bribed these men to say things and write things both the Pentagon and the pundits themselves knew to be false. If there were such payments, it would be a requirement in law that the payments would be made on the basis of contracts — like the contracts that Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, two conservative pundits, received from the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services respectively to promote legislation.

In the end, however, The story reads like a work of investigative journalism that came up entirely dry. Perhaps Barstow was tipped off to something seriously rotten and saw a Pulitzer dangling before him if he could only get chapter and verse. Perhaps someone else at the Times was, and threw the assignment to Barstow. Whatever is the case, there proved to be no there there, and Barstow was left with a huge amount of information with no clear act of wrongdoing.

So he did what is called a “notebook dump,” with the approval and even encouragement of his editors, revealing every single bit of information he uncovered. What began as a possible major scoop ended up as a “thumbsucker,” one of those “this is a cautionary tale about the way the Bush administration tried to spin the public.” Barstow’s endless tale reveals nothing more than that the Pentagon treated former military personnel like VIPs, courted them and served them extremely well, in hopes of getting the kind of coverage that would counteract the nastier stuff written about the Defense Department in the media. The fact that they were treated no better, if I have my guess right, than Thomas Friedman is treated any time his assistant places a phone call informing the pooh-bahs of Washington that the Great Man is deigning to give them an audience goes unremarked.

The honest thing to do in these circumstances is to kill the piece because you didn’t get the goods. That’s the problem with investigative journalism — often, the scandal is too confusing to be described in an exciting way, or it isn’t a scandal at all. But newspapers never kill the piece, because they spent too much money, too much time, and had too much hope to say, “You know what? This just didn’t pan out.”[/rquoter]

 

Well unlike Basso, I read his post on the issue.

So neocon Podhoretz's take is that unless one (almost said "you") proves that there was criminal bribery of military analysts the story is worthless.

Anything else goes in the Pentagon attempt to put their line into our news media. Getting a military analyst fired as the Fox guy says or having the media military analysts financially beholden to the Pentagon, as they give opinions about Pentagon issues,is ok. This is all that Americans can expect out of their news media when reporting on war issues.

Under these standards I suppose it would be ok to have all the media folks dependent for a good deal of their income from Pentagon contracts. Maybe this is the next step and the goal.

 

Thank you for clarifying. I hope that there are no hard feelings stemming from my assumption as to your meaning.

 

It is a far cry from Truman's "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster."

It is possible to have a war without profiteering, or at least without the level that we have seen with out latest foray into Iraq.

 

It is like anything else in human events. Somebody wins, most others lose. For every crisis, somebody is going to build the proverbial better mousetrap. They will get wealthy.

I don't have to like it, but to ignore it is not realistic.

 

Another good article about the propaganda effort waged on the American people by the Bush Administration to sell the war. Also tells of one of my favorite forgotten recent history events. How Bush I started the ground war in the first Gulf War after Gorbachev had worked out a deal for Sadam to leave Iraq without the ground war, but Bush I wanted to do it anyway.
************
In the investigation of how the Pentagon used TV military analysts to sell the Iraq War – thus allowing George W. Bush to “complete the job” left unfinished by his dad – the New York Times also traced the administration’s P.R. theories back to the Vietnam War and to the early days of the Reagan era.

“Many [TV military analysts] also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war,” the Times reported in the article by David Barstow.

“This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from ‘enemy’ propaganda during Vietnam.

“‘We lost the war – not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,’ he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars – taking aim not just at foreign adversaries but at domestic audiences, too.

“He called his approach ‘MindWar’ – using network TV and radio to ‘strengthen our national will to victory.’”

But the danger of “MindWar,” aimed by the U.S. government at the American people, is that it turns inside-out the concept of a democratic Republic in which a well-informed people exercise meaningful control over their government.

Instead, you end up with a duplicitous government using propaganda, fear and intimidation to whip the people into line. Rather than the government being the servant of the people, the people become the servant of the government.

Then, as undemocratic regimes have shown throughout history – with the voice of the people silenced – insiders get a free hand to carry out foolhardy policies and to line the pockets of their friends.

With the U.S. taxpayers now looking at an open-ended Iraq War with the total cost possibly reaching $3 trillion, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who the “winners” were in this “MindWar.”

Often they were the same TV military analysts and news media pundits who were advocating for the invasion more than five years ago. Almost everyone of them has made out like bandits, many with fat stock portfolios and posh vacation homes, not to mention appreciative CEOs back at corporate central.

The “losers” should be equally apparent. Besides the fleeced American taxpayers, there have been more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead, another 30,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/042108.html

 

Not a surprise at all. What's even more surprising is that a lot of people still think Bin Laden was behind 9/11. What a joke. War is the largest business of them all. Too bad because we'll all be burdened with this scheme to make the rich richer for years to come and yet really, there was nothing any of us could have done about it.

 

OK...I'll bite. Who was behind 9/11?

 

I would feel better about it if the people benefiting weren't all longstanding military contractors. In that instance it appears that the people benefiting weren't building better mousetraps, but were somewhat incestuous with the military, and may even have some degree of influence over the military (in that all the generals retire and get a job on the board, and then deal with their former subordinates).

I don't see to many new players getting rich from providing new innovations or approaches for the military. What I see is Eisenhower’s entire famous ‘military industrial complex’ feeding back on itself. I appreciate in the modern world it is impossible to find small, new contractors that compete with giants like Bowing or General Dynamics on building specialized multibillion dollar weapons systems, but many of the things in the sweet Halliburton no bid contract for instance, or some of the reconstruction engineering things could have easily been parceled out to smaller, more cost effective entities so that people were awarded the contracts on the basis of providing better service or deals.

That all of these went to these mega contracts went to people who were already suckling off the rich teat of the US military budget and being run by former military big-wigs strikes me as at the very least looking bad, and isn't someone getting rich on the merit of the 'new better mousetrap' that you are talking about.

 

What pisses me off more than anything is these retired generals getting religion after the fact. According to the article, some of them questioned the motives from the beginning. If they want to get religion now, they need to donate their earnings to the churches of fallen soilders.

this s!!t is sickening

 

These same 'people' talked about in this article who are in the business of war and propoganda. The same 'people' who had Kennedy shot. The same 'people' who took us to war in Vietnam. Could I tell you individual names? No. But to place the blame on Bin Laden for 9/11 is the same as saying Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. It just didn't happen that way. But in order to see all that stuff, you have to take a step back. Took me a while to figure it out that this country is controlled by the greedy, the powerful and the evil. Those 'people' where behind 9/11 and the very obvious controlled demolitions of the WTC.

 

CNN has been waging a war on Americans' morale and trying to steal the troops spirit since this war started. For the NYT to try to make the case that the Pentagon is shaping biased coverage is LUNACY. The libpigs in charge of our media are trying to pull a 'Vietnam' on us again and cause us to lose a war. The only way an enemy of the United States can win a war is by the lefty-movement WITHIN the United States taking the military down through a negative PR campaign. That's what we've seen for the last 5+ years. Seriously.

 

And your evidence to counter the evidence presented in the article is where?

Otherwise we have your words vs. the evidence the article.

 

so you're saying the military is weak enough to let the media influence its morale. if you believe that our military on a good day can accomplish anything, but what happens on CNN can change this reality, you don't have a very high opinion of the overall toughness of the military

 

Knowing how corporate world works, this shouldn't surprise anyone, "free press" doesn't always bring you balanced coverage.

 

Trader Jorge, defending LBJ's insistance on staying the course, once again.