Charles Kaiser on coverage of the Pentagon's propaganda scandal

Every so often, the New York Times runs a story that is everything it ought to be: sophisticated, intelligent, enterprising, and thorough. David Barstow's superb piece last Sunday met all of those standards. In 7,500 carefully chosen words, Barstow described a huge Pentagon propaganda scandal, in which retired military officers alternated between spouting the Bush administration line on all of the major TV networks and collecting inside information for the military contractors who employed them so they could get more contracts connected to the war.

These army officers—presented as objective experts by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—actually work with "more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants," Barstow reported. The companies are "all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror."

The total cost of the Pentagon's propaganda program is impossible to calculate. But in an online discussion the day after his article appeared, Barstow pointed out that the Pentagon had paid private contractors "hundreds of thousands of dollars" just to monitor the officers' on-air performances—and to make sure that they never strayed from the message they had been tasked with. The Pentagon also paid for special trips to Iraq and Guantanamo for its talking heads—and when they were taken to Iraq in 2003, "they were flown each morning on military transport planes from their hotel in Kuwait to Baghdad, and then back to Kuwait at day's end."

Many experts believe the Pentagon's program violated federal laws dating back to the 1920s that prohibit the federal government from participating in propaganda like this.

The Times sued the Pentagon to obtain more than 8,000 pages about its "message force multipliers," who could be "counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"

"Again and again," Barstow wrote, the administration 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.'"

Because most of the retired generals the Pentagon had recruited saw the propaganda program as an invaluable opportunity to cultivate contacts that could lead to more military contracts, they were extremely reliable when it come to promoting the Bush administration's official line—regardless of what they actually believed.

Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007, was, appropriately enough, a retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare. In an interview with Barstow, he said, "I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south." But when he came back from an inspection trip to appear on Fox, he declared, "You can't believe the progress," and he predicted the insurgency would be "down to a few numbers" within months.

After the New York Times itself was revealed as a victim of official government propaganda in the months running up to the Iraq invasion, it ran a lengthy mea culpa, and ultimately forced Judy Miller, the main offender on its reporting staff, to resign. So how did the television networks respond to the news that they had been so successfully manipulated by the Pentagon during the entire course of the war?

CBS and Fox refused to comment at all. NBC said, "We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest"—without acknowledging that in this case, those policies had been a total failure. ABC took a similar tack: While conceding that "the network's military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists," a spokesman said that "they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. 'We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised.'"

Then, of course, none of them gave the Times story any coverage on the evening news.

CNN used retired General James Marks as an analyst at the same time that he was successively seeking a $4.6 billion contract from the Pentagon for McNeil Technologies to provide translators in Iraq. Three years after he started working for the network, CNN said it finally realized "the extent of his dealings," and ended its relationship with him.

Once upon a time, long before Britney Spears was born, every serious news outlets would have felt compelled to follow up on such a huge story on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. No more. There was no mention of it on NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face the Nation, or ABC's This Week, although Howie Kurtz did mention it on Reliable Sources on CNN. Kurtz also followed up with a decent 900-word piece in the Washington Post on Monday.

NPR's Neal Conan led a lengthy discussion on Talk of the Nation—in which Harper's Washington editor Ken Silverstein actually advanced the story by pointing out that the program described by the Times was just one part of an even larger Surrogates Program, which included outreach to bloggers, think tanks, and new media.

Practically everyone else ignored the story, until Judy Woodruff moderated a discussion on NewsHour on Thursday between John Stauber, of the Center for Media and Democracy, and Robert Zelnick, a former ABC News Pentagon correspondent who teaches journalism at Boston University.

Stauber said the Pentagon's propaganda program was a clear violation of federal law, while Zelnick made a series of comments that should have gotten him fired as a journalism professor. "I just don't get upset about anything that's completely natural," said Zelnick. Apparently that was the attitude of most of his colleagues in the mainstream media.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald did the most thorough job of covering the story in the blogosphere. He also had the pithiest summary of the problem: "Media organizations simply ignore—collectively blackout—any stories that expose major corruption in their news reporting."

Winner:
Gabe Sherman, for pointing out in the New Republic that, besides bolstering Ralph Nader's reputation as an increasingly irrelevant egomaniac, Nader's repeated runs for the presidency are also damaging the fundraising efforts of all the useful entities he created, from Public Citizen to Citizen Works. The latter had to lay off all of its staff and vacate its offices; now it exists only on the Web.

Sinners:
Right-wing pundits like Michael Gerson who continue to denigrate Obama's position on the war in Iraq as immature, compared to the policies of those wonderful grown-ups who invented this never-ending catastrophe—and never want it to end. "The older man [McCain], by insisting on victory, is more responsible and realistic about the future," Gerson wrote. Washington punditry doesn't get any more idiotic than that.

Winner:
Graham Stewart of the Times of London, for a useful history lesson about the Olympic torch, and how we owe the whole grand tradition of carrying it across continents to Adolf Hitler.

Winner:
Libby Copeland, for explaining in the Washington Post all the different ways that Obama has become a rock star: "Politics is like rock music this way. Everyone wants everybody else to know they were there first, man, before the album's Pitchfork review and the sold-out gig at the 9:30 club," Copeland said. "You've been with Obama since The Speech? Well, I knew him before The Speech!"

Winners:
Frank Rich in the New York Times, Rick Hertzberg in the New Yorker, and especially Tom Shales in the Washington Post, for the best analysis of last week's debategate:

Frank: It earned reviews "more appropriate to a slasher movie like Prom Night than a civic event held in Philadelphia's National Constitution Center."
Rick: "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time."
Shales: "The boyish Stephanopoulos ... looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy."

Sinners: Times columnist David Brooks and Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz, for believing, naturally, that big issues like flag lapel pins got exactly the attention they deserved in Philadelphia.

Sinners:
All the press mavens (Michael Wolff, where are you?) who promised us that this time, for sure, Rupert Murdoch absolutely, positively would not interfere with the Wall Street Journal—the same way he has with every other property he has ever owned. WSJ managing editor Marcus Brauchli lasted exactly four months after Murdoch's takeover before throwing in the towel.

Reporter: Richard Vanderford
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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.