April 20th, 2008
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
President Eisenhower, Farewell Address,
Jan. 17, 1961
These are some of the generals that the Pentagon and Bush administration deployed into our living rooms, courtesy of CNN, ABC, Fox News, NBC, CBS and the other usual suspects that make up our traditional media — yes, that unrepentant bastion of America-hating liberalism.
The New York Times reports on just how well the Pentagon and the Bush administration coordinated their efforts to manipulate the American Public as they duped us into the invasion of Iraq:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Of course, as the New York Times goes on to point out, the manipulation of the American public by these very sources and tactics, continues:
Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.
Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”
“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”
April 19th, 2008
I‘m not as pessimistic as Bob Herbert, of the New York Times, but I do share some of his concerns about the harm that the Democrats are inflicting on each other with, of course, the always reliable help the Harpies in our traditional media.
Mr. Herbert reminds of the “gift” that Democrats have displayed at blowing their chances at winning the presidency:
Jimmy Carter managed to win the White House in 1976 by looking pious and riding a wave of anti-Watergate revulsion. After four hapless years, he dutifully handed the keys back to the G.O.P.
Bill Clinton tried hard to lose, with sex scandals and whatnot, during the 1992 campaign. But Ross Perot wouldn’t let him. Mr. Clinton won with a piddling 43 percent of the vote. For eight years, Mr. Clinton tried to throw the presidency away (with sex scandals and whatnot), but he was never able to succeed.
That’s been it for the party for the past 40 years. The Democrats have become so psychologically battered by these many decades in the leadership wilderness that they consider the Clinton years, during which the president was impeached and they lost control of both houses of Congress, to have been a period of triumph.
The only detail that’s missing from Mr. Herbert’s retelling of the Democrats “gift” is the willing role that so-called journalists have played in handing the presidency to republicans over those 40 years.
August 12th, 2007
This is enough to break your heart…
Nine months old, underweight, malnourished, fatherless and half Sunni, half Shiite, she already had enough deadly handicaps growing up in Saydia, a battlefield suburb that has become one of the worst sectarian killing zones in Baghdad.
On July 25, a death squad shot her mother and uncle — each three times in the head — in their dilapidated half-finished squat. E.J.K.’s, in American military shorthand: extrajudicial killings.
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Fatima is a Shiite name. (The Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima married Ali, who Shiites believe should have led the Islamic world instead of the Sunni Caliphate.) But the widowed mother and uncle were Sunnis, and the baby had their surname, Jbouri.
Painful experience had already taught Major Yerkes that Sunnis would not be safe in the health care system because it is under the control of Shiites loyal to the Mahdi Army militia.
In the two months before Fatima’s discovery, the major had handed over three Sunni insurgents to Iraqi policemen for medical treatment, only for them to be killed on arrival at the hospital.
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[Major Yerkes] was asked if he was content with Fatima’s happy ending.
“It’s not really happy yet, is it?” he said. “She is alive. We don’t know where she is going. Call me in a couple of months.”
May Fatima live long enough to see a peaceful Iraq one day.
June 16th, 2007
One of my favorite observers of the media has done it again, exposing how the cross hairs of the image-making-machine targets its casualties.
Take exhibit A:
Given the power of impressions, however, the media has effectively “taken Edwards apart” in two pictures. (This should not be surprising, though, as any candidate that trends left and threatens to play outside the establishment rules is probably doomed to the same fate.)
On first go around, Edwards was feminized and sissified. On a slow simmer for years, that stage really got hot in early March after Ann Coulter publicly called Edwards a “faggot.” It culminated in late April, however, when Adam Nagourney, Maureen Dowd (viewable via johnedwards.com) and Howard Kurtz, within the same week, not only jumped all over JE’s pricey Beverly Hills haircut, but seemed to relished the opportunity to revive what Nagourney termed the “Breck Girl sobriquet” with all three journalists plugging (read: blessing) the infamous, Edwards-slandering “I Feel Pretty” You Tube video.
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Phase two crystallized this past weekend with the publication of the NYT Magazine, above.
In the cover story, Matt Bai spends an impressive 7,827 words intimating that John Edwards is a filthy-rich hypocrite who is playing the poverty issue for political advantage. “Writes Bai: “Whenever you wrap yourself in the mantle of morality and conviction … even the smallest hypocrisy can leave an indelible stain.”
The entire post is worth a read, see the rest at HuffingtonPost.com.
