If you've wasted any of your life watching television news, you've probably suspected the retired officers who frequently populate news segments dealing with war-related topics were toeing the Administration line. You'd have to be particularly clueless not to notice. Sunday's New York Times exposes the willingness of our Corporate Media overlords to turn blind eyes to the conflicts of interest of these retired military officers in order to serve their own corporate media interests (ratings, and war-related ratings, plus helping out their good buddy GWB and Karl Rove).
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.
[Click to read the entire article, it'll be good for you (print it out and take it to your "little reading room" Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times]
Eric Alterman distills the 7,000+ word article into a few bullet points, and Glenn Greenwald has similar thoughts on the matter
This morning's "blockbuster" New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media's joint use of pre-programmed "military analysts" who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism.
At the same time, though, in light of questions on this very topic raised even by the NYT back in 2003, it is difficult to take the article's underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation. And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses.
In 2002 and 2003, when Americans were relentlessly subjected to their commentary, news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that's precisely why our news organizations -- which themselves were devoted to selling the war both before and after the invasion by relentlessly featuring pro-war sources and all but excluding anti-war ones -- turned to them in the first place. To its credit, the article acknowledges that "at least nine" of the Pentagon's trained military analysts wrote Op-Eds for the NYT itself, but many of those same sources were also repeatedly quoted -- and still are routinely quoted -- in all sorts of NYT news articles on Iraq and other "War on Terrorism" issues, something the article fails to note.
[From Major revelation: U.S. media deceitfully disseminates government propaganda - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com]
and adds, later:
Having just watched more Sunday news shows than a human being should ever have to endure, it is striking -- though unsurprising -- that not a single one saw fit to mention this NYT story demonstrating that these news programs all fed government propaganda to their viewers. That they refuse to comment on this story and will now black it out says as much about what they really are, and what they really do, as the NYT story itself does
Something to remember next time you hear a retired general fulminating for war in Iran, or wherever.
