Pentagon Propaganda-gate

On April 20th the New York TImes reported about the Pentagons propaganda campaign in Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.

The main stream media barely reported on it.

On April 29th Brian Williams commented about it on his blog, saying no one did anything wrong. Glenn Greenwald then took that apart with lots of details and summarizing with "Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as "independent" news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised."

It took until April 30th for White House Press Secretary Dana Perino to be asked about the story. Her response: "Look, I didn't know -- look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this -- look, DOD has made a decision, they've decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. And I don't think that that should be against the law. And I think that it's absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn't necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk to people." She doesn't think it should be illegal, does that mean she thinks it is illegal?

It took until May 2nd for members of the House to demand an investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General. "We believe that this unethical, and potentially illegal, propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public should have been disclosed long ago by your office, and not by a newspaper that needed to resort to suing the DoD for the information."

You know all those movies about cost cutting at news organizations affecting journalism (Good Night and Good Luck, Network, The Paper, Broadcast News, The Wire season 5), maybe they weren't fiction. ;)

I just found out about Spin, an hour long independent documentary from 1995 using footage from raw satellite feeds. It shows politicians and newscasters getting coached before their on air appearances. You can watch it on Google Video.