PBS breaks media blackout of NYT story on...

[Steve Gardner]

...Pentagon propaganda

No great surprises here. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating.

Source: Think Progress

On Sunday, The New York Times published an explosive report exposing the Pentagon’s secret campaign to use analysts in order to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Since that time, TV news organizations have largely been silent on their role in the propaganda. Ari Melber notes that last night, PBS’s Newshour finally broke this blackout, but couldn’t convince the other networks to participate:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond.

Watch PBS’s segment here:

And here's the transcript:

RAY SUAREZ: Now a look at the role of military analysts on TV and in the Pentagon. Judy Woodruff has our story.

LESTER HOLT, NBC Anchor: We turn to retired Army Colonel Ken Allard in "The War Room" -- Colonel?

COL. KEN ALLARD (Ret.), Former MSNBC Military Analyst: Lester, good evening.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Since the months leading up to the start of the Iraq war in March 2003, dozens of retired military officers served as analysts on cable and network television.

FORMER MILITARY ANALYST: We've got to have Umm Qasr to bring the humanitarian goods in. We've seen the problem about Al Nasiriyah, the fighting with the Marines...

MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY (Ret.), U.S. Army: In this case, we're moving to Baghdad, Bill, and we're going to remove that regime very shortly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: These former generals and colonels have been a mainstay of commentary and analysis. And the networks paid them for their appearances.

Now, a lengthy New York Times investigation, published on Sunday, revealed the Pentagon targeted many of these analysts as part of an information apparatus to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance.

Pentagon officials organized hundreds of private meetings with senior military leaders and the military analysts. They included talks with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

According to the Times, analysts were also taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.

It was also disclosed that most of the analysts have ties to military contractors.

JIM LEHRER: And we go again now to our retired colonels...

JUDY WOODRUFF: For the record, the NewsHour briefly put five military analysts on a retainer in 2003, but none of them attended Pentagon briefings while on retainer to the NewsHour.

In the Times report, Defense Department Spokesman Bryan Whitman defended the program and said, "The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people."

Questions of legality

JUDY WOODRUFF: For more now on all this, I'm joined by John Stauber. He is the founder and executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. It is a nonprofit organization that investigates and reports on public relations tactics. He's also the author of several books, including "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq."

And Robert Zelnick, he spent more than 20 years with ABC News and served as their Pentagon correspondent from 1986 to 1994. Today, he teaches journalism at Boston University.

And for the record, we invited Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC to participate, but they declined our offer or did not respond.

We've been talking to the Pentagon since Monday about participating in this segment. But when we finally scheduled it today, they were unable to supply a guest on short notice.

Well, gentlemen, John Stauber, let me begin with you. The Times spent two years investigating this story. They ultimately had to sue to get documents out of the Pentagon.

In your view, what is the essence of the story? What does it say that the Pentagon did?

JOHN STAUBER, Center for Media and Democracy: Well, Judy, first of all, congratulations to the NewsHour for doing this report. And it's a shame on the networks who were duped this way that they didn't show up to defend or explain their actions.

What happened here was a psy-ops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

And that's the words that are actually used, "message multipliers" for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was -- what the Pentagon did was illegal?

JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we've had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.

Holding journalists accountable

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we want to keep this, for the purposes of this discussion, focused on this particular report.

Let's turn to Bob Zelnick. Bob, you covered the Pentagon for, what, eight years for ABC?

BOB ZELNICK, Former ABC News Correspondent: Correct.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How surprised were you to see this report?

BOB ZELNICK: I wasn't surprised at all. In fact, when I covered the Pentagon, I often sought information from retired generals and admirals and colonels because I knew they were well-informed.

I knew they kept in touch. I knew they had drinks at the Army-Navy Club. I know they went to Army-Navy football games on special trains together. I knew that many of them were serving as what we called Beltway bandits or consultants.

So I wasn't surprised at all, except by the amount of space devoted to this piece by the New York Times.

And if I were giving advice to anybody, it would be, if you have an admiral on who is or a general who is currently a consultant to the Pentagon, that should be disclosed right at the top of the interview.

But we don't -- as networks, we didn't have these people on because they were neutral; we had them on because they knew what they were talking about. They had spent their lives in military affairs.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So the fact that they were recruited, as the article and as John Stauber has just cited, that they were recruited by the secretary of defense, by other people working for him specifically to get the story out, you're saying is entirely in keeping with what you've seen the Pentagon do?

BOB ZELNICK: I don't think the Pentagon recruits for ABC News; at least it didn't when I worked there. And I don't think they recruit for Fox or CNN or any of the other networks or cable operations.

I think the term "recruit" was used rather loosely to mean they recommended, perhaps, former generals or admirals to the various networks and, once they had them, they kept them informed.

And I think that's to the good. It meant that more information was available.

If occasionally a general or an admiral or a colonel who was retired and used in this fashion allowed himself to be dictated to, that's his fault. And I think any solid news person or executive editor running one of these programs would have discerned that early on and quit using him.

Disclosing Pentagon ties

JUDY WOODRUFF: John Stauber, if it was disclosed that these retired military officers were talking to the Pentagon, isn't it natural that they would have gotten briefings in some instances from the U.S. government?

JOHN STAUBER: Well, let me say I'm just shocked to hear Bob Zelnick depict and misrepresent what's going on here. And I have to wonder, Professor Zelnick, if you even read the New York Times article very closely.

This is an instant where these people were recruited by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld as agents of Pentagon propaganda and inserted into the networks.

Now, you can fault -- and we should fault -- the networks for not vetting these people properly, for not being much more careful about their credentials.

But the fact is this program began with the Pentagon, with the Bush administration, recruiting these people to be their surrogates. And those are the words that the internal documents used. This is the Pentagon Papers of this war.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Yes, I want to give Bob Zelnick a chance to respond.

BOB ZELNICK: I covered the First Gulf War, and they had just as many military analysts on the networks and the cable shops as they had this time. So it was something that the networks perceived was in their own interest to develop these kinds of contacts.

And it was in their interest. It certainly was in my interest as a Pentagon correspondent.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Bob Zelnick, what about the fact...

JOHN STAUBER: Well, I'm shocked.

Consultant role under scrutiny

JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me just follow up with Bob Zelnick. The fact that, according to the New York Times report that most of these analysts evidently had business ties to defense contractors, does that color their ability to be independent analysts?

BOB ZELNICK: As I said, I think it should be disclosed right at the outset. But what do we expect these guys to do after 30 or 40 years in the service, during which time they've risen to the ranks of the most senior officers?

We would expect them to wind up as consultants or, as I said, we call them Beltway bandits. I just don't get upset over something that's completely natural, completely to be expected, and widely known throughout the industry.

JOHN STAUBER: This was completely unknown...

JUDY WOODRUFF: John Stauber...

JOHN STAUBER: ... that these people were agents of the Defense Department.

JUDY WOODRUFF: John Stauber, just to understand, are you saying that if what these analysts were doing at the Pentagon had been fully disclosed, if their business connections with the defense contractors had been fully disclosed, would that have made what they did acceptable, in that the audience watching these interviews would have been aware?

JOHN STAUBER: No, not at all. The full disclosure actually came about this Sunday, and actually it's only partial disclosure. And that disclosure is that -- and the New York Times is the only news organization in full possession of these documents -- the Pentagon military analyst program began with Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark.

Seventy-five-plus former military officers were recruited. And they delivered the talking points of the Bush administration to manage the news media coverage and public opinion of the war.

The flow wasn't from journalists knocking on the door of the Pentagon and saying, "Excuse me, Admiral, I'd like to ask a question. First question: Are you retired and do you work for military contractors?" That would be -- that's totally fine.

The flow was illegal government propaganda, recruiting these people, and inserting them into the news, and then hiring a company to measure and quantify how good a job they did of selling the war and managing press and public opinion. This is Goebbels-like.

JUDY WOODRUFF: John Stauber -- thank you, John Stauber, we are going to have to leave it there. We will continue to follow this story. We know the New York Times is continuing to report on it. John Stauber and Bob Zelnick, we appreciate it. Thank you both.

BOB ZELNICK: Thank you.

JOHN STAUBER: Thank you.

[Steve Gardner]

And here's yet more evidence that news is being 'manufactured' to suit the Pentagon's agenda.

Source and full article: USA Today

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis, and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests and counter insurgent messages.

The news sites are part of a Pentagon initiative to expand "Information Operations" on the Internet. Neither the initiative nor the Iraqi site, www.Mawtani.com, has been disclosed publicly.

At first glance, Mawtani.com looks like a conventional news website. Only the "about" link at the bottom of the site takes readers to a page that discloses the Pentagon sponsorship. The site, which has operated since October, is modeled on two long-established Pentagon-sponsored sites that offer native-language news for people in the Balkans and North Africa.

Journalism groups say the sites are deceptive and easily could be mistaken for independent news.

"This is about trying to control the message, either by bypassing the media or putting your version of the message out before others (and) … there's a heavy responsibility to let people know where you're coming from," says Amy Mitchell, deputy director at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. A disclosure on a separate page "isn't something most people coming to the site are likely to see."

Pentagon officials say the sites are a legitimate and necessary way to promote U.S. policy goals and counter the messages of political and religious extremists. They also note that the United States and its allies have been outgunned in the battle to get information to audiences in Iraq and elsewhere.

"It's important to … engage these foreign audiences and inform," says Michael Vickers, the assistant secretary of Defense in charge of special operations and stabilization efforts. "Our adversaries use the Internet to great advantage, so we have the responsibility of countering (their messages) with accurate, truthful information, and these websites are a good vehicle."

The Mawtani site is named for the Iraqi national anthem and means "my homeland." It is available in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu — but not in English — and is supervised by the Pentagon's Iraq command.

The U.S. Southern Command is building a similar site for Latin American audiences. The Pacific Command, which covers Asia, is interested in setting up a news site, says Navy Lt. Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, a spokeswoman.

[Steve Gardner]

It will be very interesting to see if the Senate follows the House and passes this bill.

Source: Huffington Post

You probably didn't hear about the House voting to ban Pentagon propaganda last Thursday -- since the television networks have once again conveniently failed to cover the story.

But in a surprise move, a 2009 defense policy bill passed with an amendment, sponsored by Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), that outlaws the Defense Department from engaging in "a concerted effort to propagandize" the American people. The measure would also force an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) into efforts to plant positive news stories about the war in U.S. media.

An April 20 front-page New York Times article first reported how the Pentagon cultivated and coached more than 75 former military officers who became regulars on Fox News, CNN, the broadcast networks, and even NPR. One week later, the Pentagon announced that it would suspend the "briefing" program pending an internal review, which is continuing. On May 13, watchdog Media Matters documented that analysts in the Pentagon's program appeared or were quoted in major outlets more than 4,500 times.

If the Senate also passes the propaganda ban, it will send a strong message to the Pentagon and other government agencies that the Congress will not allow the continued manipulation of public opinion.

But let's not forget that this is just the most recent major government propaganda revelation in recent years. In March 2005, the New York Times revealed that several federal agencies were producing fake "video news releases" that local television stations aired as if they were bona fide news reports.

Two months before that, several "payola pundits" were discovered to be receiving lucrative government PR contracts to opine in favor of Bush administration policies -- without disclosing their financial arrangement. Armstrong Williams was the poster-child, with his $240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote the president's "No Child Left Behind Act."

It is crucial to understand that with or without the Pentagon's program, there will always be well-credentialed analysts pushing to get on the air who are eager to toe the administration's line for fame, ideology or money. And the right is historically much better at training them and getting them in front of cameras.

But at the end of the day, it is the television newsroom producers and "bookers" - and the executives who hire them -- who decide who gets on TV and who doesn't. And the vast majority of them consistently turn to government officials, major politicians and party insiders. They seldom turn to dissenting voices, critical public interest advocates and fierce critics of government policy.

On May 5, MSNBC's Chris Matthews revealed that "all my bosses [were] ... basically pro-war during the war. ... and I was up against that." Again, a major revelation ignored by most of the press that explains the culture that subsumed every major network newsroom.

On Friday, the GAO said it had already begun looking into the program and would provide a legal opinion. On the same day, the inspector general's office at the Defense Department also announced that it would investigate the Pentagon program.

The House spending bill will be taken up by the Senate after next week's recess, and legislators will have to insert a similar amendment. The White House has threatened to veto the entire bill, citing concerns with several provisions.

Congress should hold high-profile hearings to get to the bottom of the Pentagon program and force the issue into the news. If the networks won't cover it, at least C-SPAN will.

Two things are certain. First, consolidated, corporate media is failing to provide critical journalism, and is aiding and abetting government propaganda. Second, this is not the last time this media blight will rear its ugly head, and as long as it does, the American public will continue to be led by the nose to support disastrous wars, policies and politicians.

[Steve Gardner]

Here's an interesting extract from the testimony of William Schaap from The King Center. Schaap's full testimony can be viewed in teddy's thread, entitled, Government Disinformation and Control of the Media.

It explains a little bit about how disinformation, such as that said to have been put out by the Pentagon, works.

Q. Before we go into some specific instances of this and details, can you explain to the Court and Jury really how does disinformation work? And why is it so -- why is it so successful?

A. Well, you have to understand first the target of propaganda -- of disinformation. The consumer of the false news so to speak is -- in what we're talking about is the American public in general and sometimes the public overseas. Dis-information is almost always by -- by definition, about things that the average person has no separate personal knowledge of, otherwise it couldn't really work. I mean, you can't fool the people you're talking about. You can fool the other people who don't know about it. You're not trying to fool the people you're talking about.

The simplest example is during the Vietnam War when there was a massive bombing campaign and the U.S. was bombing Cambodia. President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger repeatedly made public statements that we were not dropping bombs in Cambodia. Well, you couldn't fool the Cambodians who looked up and saw the bombs falling in their back yard. They knew you were bombing Cambodia. But the American people by and large accepted these statements as truth, and in fact that was a disinformation campaign that was later admitted.

You're -- really we're talking about things that the public has no separate knowledge of. And it's also reinforced by the fact that Americans generally tend to believe what their government tells them, to believe that government officials on all levels generally tell the truth. And that -- if you have that, that absence of skepticism, it's a major plus for the disinformationists.

And, also, it's very, very unusual around the world other than in the United States. In most other countries, particularly in Europe, it's much more the opposite. People tend on average to be very skeptical of their government. If the Italian government issues a statement, the average Italian on the street will say it's probably a lie until you can prove to me otherwise that it's not a lie. Because governments lie. That's what they -- you know, they sort of expect them to do that whereas Americans don't expect that.

The average American would hear something from the government or hear the news on television and assumes that what they're hearing is the truth unless they're shown otherwise. They assume that almost nothing is ever a conspiracy. In Europe it's very much the opposite. Anything happens. They tend to think it's a conspiracy unless you show them that it wasn't a conspiracy. I mean, after all, "conspiracy" just means, you know, more than one person being involved in something. And if you stop and think about it, almost everything significant that happens anywhere involves more than one person. Yet here there is a -- not a myth really, but there's just an underlying assumption that most things are not conspiracies. And when you have that, it enables a government which has a propaganda program, has a disinformation program, to be relatively successful in -- in having its disinformation accepted.

The other reason why it -- why it works even though as we -- as we know, somewhere there are people who know it's not true. Somewhere they know you're lying about something. But another reason it works is that disinformation is very, very effective over time. The longer that you, whoever you are, can control the spin on a story, the more that spin becomes accepted as the absolute truth. And in this country the government has a great deal of power and influence over that spin.

[Steve Gardner]

Following the House's vote to ban Pentagon propaganda (see above post), a companion bill has been proposed. What's funny is the wording: "A bill to prohibit the use of funds by the Department of Defense for propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law".

Three things struck me:

• this limits only the DoD
  
• it only limits the DoD propaganda effort within the US
  
• it appears to suggest that some DoD propaganda might actually be 'specifically authorized by law' within the US

Source: The Raw Story

Last April, the New York Times revealed that retired officers serving as military analysts on television news shows had regularly been briefed by the Pentagon and supplied with pro-war and pro-administration talking points.

The program was "temporarily suspended" by the Pentagon a week later. Now four senators have introduced legislation to prevent it from resuming.

Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), John Kerry (D-MA), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) have introduced S. 3099, titled "A bill to prohibit the use of funds by the Department of Defense for propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law."

"This Administration has a history of pushing propaganda on the American public," Sen. Lautenberg explained. "The American people expect our federal government to tell the nation the truth."

"There is no need for paid cheerleaders to support an argument," added Sen. Menendez.

The bill is a companion measure to an amendment to the military authorization bill which passed the House of Representatives on May 23. The television networks, which avoided reporting on the original New York Times story, have also paid little notice to the House ban.

Following the House passage of the amendment, the inspector general's office at the Department of Defense announced that it would be looking into the program, while the Government Accountability Office said it was already doing so. The Senate bill mandates that both those offices report to Congress within 90 days.

"We're going to make sure the public money isn't used for propaganda campaigns that undermine the public trust," Sen. Kerry stated. "The American people should not have to wonder whether the purportedly non-partisan, expert analysis they see on television might have been shaped by a government propaganda campaign."