Friday, October 31, 2008
We R Mushroom People & Mushroom People We Shall Be
kept in the dark and fed on feculence
A Federal Communications Commission investigation of on-air military analysts is providing a glimpse of what Democrats and an Obama administration will do to critics ...
...In the Oct. 2 letters to 19 analysts and various TV networks, the FCC cited a New York Times article which accused the analysts of receiving the Pentagon information in exchange for positive commentary on the air. The letters, signed by Hillary S. DeNigro, chief of the agency’s investigations and hearings division, said such an arrangement might violate the Communications Act of 1934.
The FCC sent the letters after receiving a complaint from Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, (D-Conn.) and Rep. John Dingell, (D-Mich.). Dingellbawlz has a history of using committee staff to browbeat and investigate Republican administrations.
"In their complaint, Representatives DeLauro and Dingell express concern that the analysts and [TV stations] may have failed to disclose this exchange of consideration to the stations, as required by section 507 of the Communications Act of 1934,” said the FCC letter. “They also suggest that the stations may have aired your commentary without making appropriate sponsorship identification announcements at the time such material was aired, as required” by the act...."Our chief concern is that as a result of the analysts’ participation in this DoD program, which included the DoD’s paying for their commercial airfare on DoD-sponsored trips to Iraq, the analysts and the networks that hired them could have run afoul of certain laws or regulations."
...[Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney], a hawk on the Iraq war, said the information the Pentagon supplied him and other commentators was the same as provided to the news media.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ended the private analysts briefings. Besides the FCC probe, the Pentagon inspector general is reviewing the program, which was started by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after the September 1, 2001 attacks.
...The FCC is giving the 19 analysts 30 days to respond to the charges. [HUMAN EVENTS Editor Jed Babbin was a member of the group of military analysts who met frequently with senior Pentagon officials and participated in the program. He did not receive a letter from the FCC.]
[emph mine - e~C]
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that a Department of Defense program had ex-military officers presenting the Bush administration’s position on the War on Terror as objective analysis on major television news programs and 24-hour cable news networks.
"Given the revelations in the [New York Times] article, had the FCC not heeded our request for an investigation, it would have raised serious questions about their oversight capabilities. I am pleased with today’s news, but will continue to monitor the situation to ensure the FCC fully investigates the networks in addition to the analysts,” DeLauro said in a
statement Tuesday [presumably 10/7 - e~C].According to the Times report, Department of Defense documents described the analysts as “message force multipliers” instructed to deliver “administration themes and messages” to the public “in the form of their own opinions.” The report found that these analysts—who The Times called “a media Trojan horse” for the administration—were encouraged to convey specific Defense Department talking points to the public, even when they suspected the information could be exaggerated or false.
What evidence I could find of the encouragement to “convey specific DoD talking points to the public, even when they suspected the information could be exaggerated or false” is in the NYT article below [assumed to be the one DeLauro and Dingel found so compelling].
...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.
...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.
...In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.
A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.
...Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war.
...Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.
So there was disagreement with DOD/Administration policies; while many of the old military guys agreed with… uhm, the military PoV. Shocking, that. And also disagreed with the sniping undermining disagreement from the Barking Media. Shocking 2, I suppose.
Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”
The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.
Whyinhell would they b so audacious as to fight back against negative coverage?!? Why not just go ahead and lose in the media? Hey - it worked for Viet Nam! [depending on your definition of “worked,” I suppose]
Have these folks ever even heard about the enormous control over information and the media exercised by the gubbmint during WWII? That would give ‘em the heebie-jeebies.
Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.
“Key messages” could also be read as “relevant facts.” But not so much by folks inclined to use language in this manner:
The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.
"the administration’s neoconservative brain trust" ?!? I wonder how many times they’ve ever used the phrase "Obamna’s neoliberal brain trust?” Just, yanno, for laffs…
a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,”
Maybe because it wouldn’t happen?
The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.
“Subverted?” Being that “traditional journalism” had completely abandoned straight factual reporting and was therefore already “subverted,” I hardly think that’s an apt phrase…
Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.
Proof? *pfaff* The NYT said it. They believe it. That’s it.
Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.
Sounds lie a necessary defensive strategy to me, a bitter hawkish clinging raaaacist...
Snippets of their evidence: [The article is a worthwhile read]
There were also ideological ties. ...
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 at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”
I find nothing to argue with there. Though, I think the ideological descendants of Walter Cronkite might…
As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.
Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.
So, if it were just a case of “message carrying” for reasons of ideological congruency and in return for access and financial reward, why would Omnitec evaluation have been necessary?
It strikes me as, shall we say, rather disingenuous to characterize efforts of the Administration to get its message out as some dark conspiracy when it was like pushing a rope-handled shovel to get the media to simply report the facts as they stood. If the media had been doing its job, milblogs and places like the Long War Journal, Michael Yon Online and others wouldn’t have sprung up—they wouldn’t have been necessary.
And now we’re faced with the criminalization of any voice from the “other side.” I wonder if the American people have any freakin’ clue… And what they’d do if they did.
MinTx for the article
raz0r for the tip
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