US TV NEWS Refuses to Report the News That They Brainwashed You With Pentagon PSY-OPS - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

host · 05-10-2008, 02:52 PM

It is a crime from the US Military to wage propaganda and psychological warfare operations within the United States. It appears from this evidence, supplied as a result of settling a lawsuit brough by the NY Times, that this is exactly what the US Military has done.

Many in the US believe that the press is "too liberal", or has a "liberal" bias. The TV network news operations show no indication that they resisted these military "Ops", or any admission, even now, that they have done anything wrong, or intentionally misled anyone. Most disturbing of all, they refuse to broadcast any reports of this news story, as it has unfolde over the past four weeks. The most viewed TV news network anchor, NBC News' Brian Williams, has actually defended his and his network's role in these "OPs"....only on his blog, not on television:

Quote:

http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/ar...29/958477.aspx
Different Times
Posted: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 4:41 PM by Barbara Raab
Filed Under: Brian Williams

By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor

......A few of you correctly noted I’ve yet to respond to the recent Times front-page article on the military analysts employed by the television networks, including this one.....

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ams/print.html

Brian Williams' "response" to the military analyst story
The NBC News anchor is finally forced to address the NYT exposé -- on his blog. His self-defenses raise far more questions than they answer.

Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 30, 2008 | (updated below)

"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand - New York Times
The Pentagon has cultivated “military analysts” in a campaign to generate favorable ... wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. ..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/wa...pagewanted=all

Is it possible for anyone who believes that the media is "too liberal", to consider that maybe, instead, their POV is too conservative, to the point that it has encouraged the military to break the law and damage it's relationship with the American people?

Should those in the military and in the executive branch be prosecuted for what they have done to our opinion shaping process in this country?

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/bu...ll&oref=slogin

April 21, 2008
Talk to the Newsroom
Q & A With David Barstow

An article by David Barstow on Sunday reported that the Pentagon has cultivated “military analysts” in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance. Since publication of the article, The Times has received more than <a href="http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html">1,400 comments</a>. Mr. Barstow is responding to readers’ questions on the article.

Timeliness

Q. Thanks for this one Mr Barstow. I guess if I have a question it's: What took you so long?
— Daniel Abraham, Long Beach, Calif.

A. Thanks for the question, Mr. Abraham. This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department that described its interactions with network military analysts. We pushed as hard as we could, but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.

Legality

Q. One question not pursued in the article, and which may be of continuing relevance, is whether or not it was/is legal for the military to mount a covert "psychological operations" effort whose explicit target is Americans on American soil.
— Bill, Austin, Tex.

A. It is not legal for the U.S. government to direct psychological operations or propaganda against the American people. But the lines between ordinary public affairs and propaganda are sometimes blurry, and there are varying views as to whether this particular campaign crossed those lines. A Pentagon spokesman said its intent was to keep the American people informed about the war by providing prominent military analysts with factual information and frequent, direct access to key military officials. As Lawrence Di Rita, a former senior Pentagon official told me, they viewed it as the “mirror image” of the Pentagon program for embedding reporters with units in the field. In this case, the military analysts were in effect “embedded’’ with the senior leadership through a steady mix of private briefings, trips and talking points. But internal documents show that Pentagon officials also viewed the military analysts as “surrogates” or “message force multipliers’’ who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages’’ as if they were their own views, and several analysts asserted in interviews that they were sometimes given false or misleading information on a variety of topics related to the war.

Taxpayer Dollars

Q. I am wondering if you have any statistics concerning the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on these so-called analysts?
— NHD, Ann Arbor, Mich.

A. It is difficult to assess the total amount of tax money spent on this effort. Significant sums were spent taking military analysts on trips to Iraq and Guantanamo. For example, when a group of analysts 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. They traveled around Iraq in heavily guarded convoys. In recent years, the Pentagon has paid the commercial airfare of some analysts who participated in trips to Iraq. The Pentagon also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a private contractor to monitor their news media appearances.

The Networks' Side of the Story

Q. While this is an excellent piece of reporting in covering the relationship between the networks' star military analysts and the Pentagon, the networks themselves essentially get a free pass. To say that the networks simply neglected to investigate conflicts of interest obscures the fact that overall there was a huge gap between the picture of the war presented through news reporting and that presented through so-called expert analysis. That gap must have been as obvious to the networks themselves as it was to anyone else. The editors and executives who made no effort to close that gap have questions to answer. Why did you not dig more deeply into the network side of this story?
— Paul Woodward, Asheville, N.C.

A. We did dig into the network side of this story. Two networks, CBS and Fox News, declined to answer any questions about their use of military analysts, including what specific steps they took to vet them for business ties that could pose conflicts and what ethical guidelines they established for them. NBC would not allow any executives to be interviewed, but released a short statement saying it had “clear policies in place’’ to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest. Spokesmen for CNN and ABC said that while their military analysts were expected to keep them informed of outside sources of income, neither network had written ethics policies governing potential conflicts of interest with their analysts. But the question you raise – why didn’t the network news executives try to “close the gap’’ between what journalists were reporting and what some analysts were saying – is a good one. One possible answer: Several analysts said in interviews that network news officials tended to defer to their experience and expertise in military matters.

Policies of The New York Times

The following two questions were directed to Bill Keller, executive editor, and Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor.

Q. Does the Times have any "military consultants" on staff, and do they have any ties to the military-industrial complex? How much do you pay them? Do they profit from this war? Do they have any ties to the White House - or were they supplied by the administration? Perhaps those in glass houses should not throw rocks.
— Mary Hilton, Norway, Me.

A. The Times does not employ military consultants, nor do we pay sources (military-industrial or otherwise) for information. Our reporters who cover military affairs, like all of our journalists, are prohibited by our ethics policy from having any financial holding that would represent a conflict of interest.
— Bill Keller, executive editor

Q. Which NY Times Op-Ed pieces were written by the Pentagon influenced analysts, and why did the NY Times use them? Have you taken steps to prevent this from happening again?
— Neale Adams, Vancouver

A. According to reporting by The Times, nine of the military analysts who received briefings or trips from the Pentagon as part of an effort to produce more favorable news coverage of the war in Iraq have written articles that were published on our Op-Ed Page. We published those opinion articles because we believed the authors had expertise in the areas about which they were writing, and that their opinions -- which often had nothing to do with the war in Iraq -- were worth our readers' notice.

It is important to note that these were presented as opinion articles on our Op-Ed page, not as military analysis or objective reporting, and that in many cases, we asked the authors to write about topics of our choosing. They were not articles that were offered to us. In any case, none of the articles reflected the Pentagon's efforts to paint a falsely rosy view of events in Iraq, nor was there any conflict involving any author's business interests. As a matter of policy, The Times requires its Op-Ed contributors to disclose any business or financial connections they may have with the subject of their articles. The contract Op-Ed contributors are required to sign mandates that they fully and truthfully disclose any conflicts.

One of the nine authors was named in The Times's article on the Pentagon program: retired Army Gen. James Marks. General Marks wrote an Op-Ed article entitled "Rebels, Guns and Money," which we published on Nov. 10, 2004. It discussed the tactics, strategies and techniques involved in urban warfare, looking ahead to an impending military assault on the city of Falluja. General Marks did not take a stand on how the war was going in Iraq.

Of the other eight authors, who were not named in The Times article on the Pentagon campaign, one was a consistent and prominent critic of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and four wrote articles that were not about the war in Iraq. None of the remaining three offered assertions about the course of the war in Iraq or based their articles on Pentagon briefings or junkets.

It is the policy of The Times's editorial department to do everything we can to tell our readers what our Op-Ed contributors bring to the table -- whether it is a political affiliation, a business interest, or anything else that helps readers evaluate the authors' opinions. We will continue to do so in the future. The article about the Pentagon program gives us valuable information to use in that effort.
— Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor

The Origins of the "Message Machine"

Q. In speaking of Torie Clarke, the former Pentagon public relations executive, the article states: "...even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit key influentials -- movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld's priorities." I'm wondering what Mr. Rumsfeld's priorities were before 9/11, and why was the Pentagon building a network of "influentials" to shape public opinion before 9/11?
— SLOreader, San Luis Obispo, Calif.

A. Ms. Clarke’s team reached out to so-called “key influentials” before Sept. 11 to generate support for a variety of Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities, including ballistic missile defense and his plan to transform the military into a leaner and more agile force. In her 2006 memoir, "Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game," Ms. Clarke wrote: "I was obsessed with reaching out to people who were, in turn, reaching out to thousands and millions on a regular basis." Beyond retired officers, the Pentagon also reached out to a range of leaders -- from religious groups, non-governmental organizations, labor unions and major corporations. But the retired officers received by far the most attention in the years after Sept. 11 because of their impact on the coverage of the war, especially as TV and radio military analysts.

Network Standards

Q. Network news is rife with "hired expert" analysis, in fields ranging from medicine to finance. Is there any evidence that the conflict of interest standards were bent more severely for generals than others? Isn't this evidence of a much bigger problem, and more reason that real reporters ought to be getting all the air time on news programs, and the so-called "experts" either interviewed without pay or relegated to the TV talk shows?
— Paul, Lake Luzerne, N.Y.

A. This is not the first time TV news organizations have confronted questions about undisclosed conflicts involving outside consultants or analysts. The financial news networks, for example, confronted this issue several years ago in connection with hidden financial interests of some stock market commentators. The subsequent outcry led to more disclosure. But with military analysts, the networks have not been as diligent about disclosing to viewers outside ties that could present a conflict of interest. Military analysts are typically introduced to viewers with brief descriptions of their military backgrounds. Viewers are not told whether they do or do not have ties to military contractors with interests in the subjects they are asked to discuss.

Q. Your article refers to the fact, on several occasions, the various network "handlers" are unaware of the liaison the "military analysts" enjoy with Pentagon staff. How can that be? Are they that naive?
— desertrat, Las Vegas, Nev.

A. In interviews, many military analysts said the same thing -- that the network officials they deal with the most (the bookers, producers and anchors) had only the vaguest idea of the frequency or subject matter of their interactions with the Pentagon. In part, this is because the sessions were almost always kept "off the record" or "on background," and some analysts interpreted this to mean that they could not even disclose these sessions to network news executives. Several analysts said that on the basis of a briefing, they might then pitch an idea for a segment to a producer or booker. Sometimes they would even help write the questions for the anchors to ask during the segment.

A Change in Protocol?

Q. Has Secretary Gates changed the DOD protocol?
— Richard Melanson, Annapolis, Md.

A. Military analysts have told me that under Secretary Gates, they still get plenty of access, but not in quite the same way. They have not, for example, had the kind of regular meetings with him that they used to have with Mr. Rumsfeld, although they are briefed almost weekly by other senior military officials.

Here is the damning evidence contained in just two pages of the Pentagon release:

Quote:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanaly...20-%207922.pdf

From: Oi Rita. larry, elv. OSD·OASD·PA I Sent: Monday. January 17, 2005 7:27 AM To: I
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Subject: Re: New Ideas for Military analyst coverage • Iraq trip I
. This is a thoughtful note ...r think it makes a lot of sense to do as you suggest ana 1
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guess I thoughjt we already were doing a lot of this in terms of quick contact, etc...we
ought to be doing this. though, and we should not make the list too small ...
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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
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-----Original Message----From:
Merritt, Roxie T. CAPT, OASD-PA <Roxie.Merritt
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I I I Bryan, SES, OASD-PA <.B .W· a" 0 <George. Rhynedance;~W~;//'?>' .. Lawrence, Dallas OASD-PA <Roxie ,Merritt LCD cc: Sent: Fri Jan 14 19:25:08 2005 Subject: RE:New Ideas for Military analyst coverage -Iraq trip
BACKGROUND:
One of the most interesting things coming from this trip to Iraq with the media \
analysts was learning how their jobs have been undergoing a metamorphosis. There are
several reasons behind the morpho .. with an all voluntary military, no one in the media I
has current military background. Additionally, we have been doing a good job of keeping
these guys informed 50 that ~hey have the ready answers when the network comes calling.
I
CURRENT ISSUES:
I
The key issue here is that more and more, media analysts are having a greater impact
I
on the television media network coverage of military issues. They have now become the geI
to guys not only on breaking storys. but they influence the view5 on issues. Th~y also h.ave a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively I I with regards to military. In media ops, I have been using them more frequently to get our side of the story out II with media sensitive departments such as USD!, which is typically hard to penetrate with traditionally media, but that we have found to be receptive to talking to the analysts I I such as ~en Robinson. RECOMMENDATION:
I
1.1 I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analysts list of those
I
that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a "hot list" that we
I
immediately make calls to or put on an email distro before we contact or respond to media
I
on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with thiB list and give them tips
on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on upcoming issues as they are I
I developing. By providing them with current and valuable information, they become the key
go to guys for the networks and <h3>it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts I
I by the networks themselves.</h3>
2.) We need to continue with Dalla's initiative to do regional trips for the analysts I
I on a routine basis. Even though some of these guys on this trip had been to Iraq last
llumm9r, the l:lndacapCl had changed 100 dramatically th-.t they were "wowed" at the changee in I
such a short amount of time. would like to arrange a trip to Afghanistan next.
I
3.} Media ops and outreach can work on a plan to maximize use of the analysts and
I
figure out a eystem by which we keep our most reliably friendly analysts plugged in on
I
everything from crisis response to future plans. Th!s trusted cote group will be more
I
than Willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter, and the more
I

NY TIMES 7815

they know the more valuable they are to the networks. t.) I am also going forward on working regional media trips and looking at trips for publishers, columnists and. specialty media, including radio.
5.) As evidenced by this analyst trip to Iraq, the synergy of outreach shop and media ops working t09~ther on these type of projects is enormous and effective. will continue to exam ways to improve processes.
Roxie T. Merritt Captain, U.S. Navy Director, DoD Press Operations Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Pentagon. Room Washin ton DC 2030 -1400
Pursuit of All Who Threaten It"

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...sts/index.html

....So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to <b>shape and mold the networks' coverage choices</b>. </p>

<p>Even a casual review of the DoD's documents leaves no doubt that this is exactly how the program worked. The military analysts most commonly used by MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC routinely received instructions about what to say in their appearances from the Pentagon. As but one extreme though illustrative example, Dan Senor -- Fox News analyst and husband of CNN's Campbell Brown -- would literally ask Di Rita before his television appearances what he should say (7900, 7920-21), and submitted articles to him, such as one he wrote for <I>The Weekly Standard</i> about how great the war effort was going, and Di Rita would give him editing directions, which he obediently followed. </p>

<p>Among the most active analysts in this program were <b>all three</b> of the most commonly used MSNBC commentators -- Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. Wayne Downing, and Col. Ken Allard. They were frequently summoned by Chris Matthews and (in the case of Downing) by Brian Williams as NBC's resident experts. Matthews referred to them as "HARDBALL's war council" on January 17, 2005, when he had all three of them on together to bash <i>The New Yorker</i>'s Seymour Hersh for reporting that the Pentagon was preparing attack plans against Iran -- an article that, like most Hersh articles, infuriated Di Rita and other DoD officials. The next day, Allard proudly wrote to Di Rita:<blockquote>As you may have seen on MSNBC, I attributed a lot of what [Hersh] said to disgruntled CIA employees <b>who simply should be taken out and shot</b>.</blockquote><BR><BR><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_MnYI3_FRbbQ/SCWdjjTKuWI/AAAAAAAAAwU/MItfoplgSX4/s1600-h/allard.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_MnYI3_FRbbQ/SCWdjjTKuWI/AAAAAAAAAwU/MItfoplgSX4/s400/allard.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5198734578965723490" border="0" /></a><BR><BR>In light of all of this, it is very hard to dispute the excited analysis of an unnamed Lt. Col when, in a March 4, 2005 email to various Pentagon officials (7751), he described the military analyst program as producing a "<u>big payback</u>." He then went further:<blockquote>There are about 50 retired military analysts that are part of this group. . . . these are the folks that end up on FOX, CNN, etc. interpreting military happenings. These calls are conducted frequently <b>and offer HUGE payback</b>. . . . these end up being the people who <b>carry the mail on talk shows</b>.</blockquote>

I think a military/civilian conservatives coup may have already taken place, and the news that the TV networks are not reporting is that they and the coup plotters are the winners, and the rest of us have already lost!

Ustwo · 05-10-2008, 03:34 PM

Ok, self edit, I'll just let this one burn out on its own.

host · 05-10-2008, 04:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Ok, self edit, I'll just let this one burn out on its own.

I read Ustwo's post before he edited it. He thinks that this is a joke. He posted that "We will soon be coming for you and giving you a number"....or words to that effect.... Rumsfeld and the retired milirary hacks were laughing, too....at the law, and at the US constitution....our constitution. Still "frat boys" after all of these years.... what do you consider sworn former and current civilian and military officials, and their compliant corporate media lapdogs who have such contempt for the law and for our constitution? motherfucking traitors !

Quote:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200805070008?f=s_search
Wed, May 7, 2008 7:47pm ET

Send to a friend Print Version
Memo to the media: Have you hosted on air the person who told Rumsfeld at military analyst meeting, "You are the leader. You are our guy"?

Summary: In an audio recording of an April 18, 2006, Pentagon meeting attended by several media military analysts, one of the attendees tells then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that he would "personally love" for Rumsfeld "to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it." He adds: "And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy." Will media outlets try to determine if they have hosted the speaker?

Following the publication of the April 20 New York Times front-page <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F04%2F20%2Fwashington%2F20generals.html%3F_r%3D1%26hp%3D%26oref%3Dslogin%26pagewanted%3Dall">article</a> on the hidden ties between media military analysts and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense has released to the public numerous documents regarding the analyst program. One of the documents released is an <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dod.mil%2Fpubs%2Ffoi%2Fmilanalysts%2F23%2520Apr%252008%2FAudio%2520Files%2FCJCS%2520and%2520SecDef%25204.18.06.wav">audio recording</a> of an April 18, 2006, meeting that several military analysts attended with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the meeting, one of the attendees tells Rumsfeld, "[W]e get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating" and says that he would "personally love" for Rumsfeld "to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it." The individual adds: "And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy." The <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dod.mil%2Fpubs%2Ffoi%2Fmilanalysts%2F25%2520Feb%252008%2520Appeal%2520%2528Transcript%2529%2F06-F-1532%2520Rum-Pace%2520Transcript%252018%2520April%252006.pdf">transcript</a> released by the Pentagon does not identify the person who made this comment; the Pentagon has provided this <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics8.nytimes.com%2Fpackages%2Fflash%2Fus%2F20080419_RUMSFELD%2Fgrafx%2Fpdf%2Finvites.pdf">list</a> of "confirmed" "[p]articipants." Media Matters for America has documented the <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200805020010?f=s_search">consistent</a> unwillingness of most of the outlets mentioned in the Times article to discuss the military analyst story. Will media outlets try to determine if they have hosted the person who asserted that Rumsfeld was "our guy" and suggested that he would "parrot[]" Rumsfeld's statements?

The Times article quoted portions of the individual's statement.

According to the <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?to=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics8.nytimes.com%2Fpackages%2Fflash%2Fus%2F20080419_RUMSFELD%2Fgrafx%2Fpdf%2Finvites.pdf">list</a> released to the Times by the Pentagon, "confirmed" "[p]articipants" for the April 18, 2006, meeting with Rumsfeld and Pace included:

Jed Babbin

Lt. Gen. Frank B. Campbell

Dr. James Jay Carafano

Col. (Tim) J. Eads

Gen. Ronald Fogelman

Col. John Garrett

Gen. William F. "Buck" Kernan

Lt. Col. Robert L. Maginnis

Col. Jeff McCausland

Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney

Capt. Chuck Nash

Gen. William L. Nash

Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr.

Maj. Gen. Donald W. Shepperd

Wayne Simmons

Capt. Martin L. Strong

Gen. Tom Wilkerson

The Times article reported that ABC military analyst William Nash was "repulsed" by the meeting and quoted him saying: "I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions."

<h3>From the April 18, 2006, meeting:

UNIDENTIFIED 1: I'm an old intel guy, and I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. And that is "psyops." Now, most people, when they hear that, they think, "Oh my God --

RUMSFELD: Yeah.</h3>

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- "they're trying to brainwash [inaudible]."

<h3>RUMSFELD: "What are you, some kind of nut? You don't believe in the Constitution?"

UNIDENTIFIED 2: Well, he is.

[laughter]</h3>

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Some have characterized [inaudible]. But I would also disagree with you, sir, respectfully. You are absolutely brilliant in front of the camera. And anybody --

RUMSFELD: It's by acting. Because I don't spend any time --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: It doesn't matter. The point is that you are. And I think most of us would agree with that. And --

RUMSFELD: But I -- but -- but --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- to take the offensive is -- because many of us go on every day. We don't agree with everything the administration does, maybe with some of your decisions and -- but we get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating, and then we take the -- and we're all thick-skinned, or we wouldn't continue to do this.

<h3>RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: But we would love -- I would personally love -- and I think I speak for most of the gentlemen here at the table -- for you to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting<.h3>, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it.

[crosstalk]

UNIDENTIFIED 1: And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy.

Why are we paying pensions to and preserving the rank of retired military officers who have committed treason on the screens in our living rooms?

Lindy · 05-10-2008, 04:58 PM

Tiresome, as usual.
Lindy

MuadDib · 05-10-2008, 05:38 PM

Does this belong in Tilted Politics or Tilted Paranoia?

Shauk · 05-10-2008, 05:44 PM

it belongs in "read the artcles and figure it out yourself"

as per usual I think host tend to overwhelm and over-estimate the attention span of the average person on this forum.

to put everything together because the rest is redundant imo

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/wa...ll&oref=slogin

thats really the only thing he needed to link.

and heres the follow up, roughly a week later

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...57C0A96E9C8B63

Translation: Oh hey, sorry bout that, we'll look in to it for you.

loquitur · 05-10-2008, 06:10 PM

snark removed

Shauk · 05-10-2008, 06:29 PM

and people fucking fail at reading comprehension again.

NEWS and MEDIA are methods of mass transmission. The message you put out over this method gets to many many many families and individuals.

You have "analysts" with an agenda offering their "oh so impartial" opinion of what the U.S. Military/Goverment "should" do across this medium, and the lesser educated, or, oh fuck, even the equally educated types who are trusting them to have thought this through to it's full realization, are going to agree with the assessment, and maybe even quote you on it, and thus, propagation of the agenda ensues.

Mind over matter. If they have your minds, they will have your allegiance.

ottopilot · 05-10-2008, 07:01 PM

I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it (my medication) anymore...

host · 05-10-2008, 07:09 PM

Thank you, Shauk.

Ustwo, Lindy, loquitur, MuadDib, our elected leaders, our military leaders, present and former, and out dominant corporate broadcasting news outlets have all achieved a new low....why have you come here to obscure what they have done, or to demonstrate that it is not as bad as I'm presenting it to be. If anything, it is worse. What motivates you, just an urge to shoot the messenger?

Quote:

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/decdoc/p...#_Toc197843505

Broadcast Journalism LAW AND POLICY ON SPECIFIC KINDS OF PROGRAMMING

Introduction. As noted above, in light of the fundamental importance of the free flow of information to our democracy, the First Amendment and the Communications Act bar the FCC from telling station licensees how to select material for news programs, or prohibiting the broadcast of an opinion on any subject. We also do not review anyone’s qualifications to gather, edit, announce, or comment on the news; these decisions are the station licensee’s responsibility. Nevertheless, there are two issues related to broadcast journalism that are subject to Commission regulation: hoaxes and news distortion.....

.....News Distortion. The Commission often receives complaints concerning broadcast journalism, such as allegations that stations have aired inaccurate or one-sided news reports or comments, covered stories inadequately, or overly dramatized the events that they cover. For the reasons noted above, the Commission generally will not intervene in such cases because it would be inconsistent with the First Amendment to replace the journalistic judgment of licensees with our own. However, as public trustees, broadcast licensees may not intentionally distort the news: <h1>the FCC has stated that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.”</h1> The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of such rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news. Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news. However, absent such a compelling showing, the Commission will not intervene. For additional information about news distortion, see http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/journalism.html.

Quote:

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=854690

May 09, 2008 16:08 ET
SPJ Leaders Express Concern Over Pentagon's Military Domestic Propaganda Operation

INDIANAPOLIS, IN--(Marketwire - May 9, 2008) - Leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists today urged the nation's media to hold their military analysts to the same ethical standards journalists are required to meet concerning potential conflicts of interest, financial ties and relationships with government agencies.

SPJ leaders also expressed outrage at what an April 20 New York Times story revealed to be the federal government's willingness to use these analysts as a "media Trojan horse" to spread the administration's perspective on the Iraq war.

According to the Times story, the Pentagon, by controlling access and disseminating selective information about the war effort has co-opted some military analysts to generate favorable news coverage during the Iraq war.

In addition, the Times story showed that few national television networks understood their own analysts' financial ties to defense industry contractors doing business with the U.S. military. The story further illustrated that the media also does not understand the analysts' working relationship with the military that helps shape their views.

"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," wrote Times reporter David Barstow. "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." ....

Quote:

http://www.pnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art...NION/805050310
May 5, 2008

You won't see it on TV

Military analysts tied to Pentagon contracts

It's hard to say who looks worse in the flap over tainted military analysts working for network television news operations: the Pentagon or the networks.

<h3>We vote for the networks.

That doesn't excuse the Pentagon, which engaged in a blatant propaganda effort it should have known was not just wrong, but eventually would be exposed.

But it was the responsibility of the networks to know whether the retired military officers they were presenting to their viewers as "objective" had, in fact, conflicts of interest that could compromise their objectivity.

At the very least they owed it to their viewers to reveal the conflicts so they could evaluate the analysts' commentary with the requisite grain of salt.

If you haven't heard much about this story from the networks, it is because they are doing their best to ignore it.</h3>

It was exposed by The New York Times, which found that dozens of retired high-ranking officers, supposedly providing independent on-air analysis of the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism, were in fact closely tied to military contractors profiting from the conflicts, and to the Pentagon, which provided those contracts and, in many cases, the "talking points" these analysts would deliver on the air.

According to the Times, these "analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants."

What it means is the Pentagon was able to seed the networks with "analysts" the viewing public assumed to be honest brokers of commentary, when in fact they might have had a powerful vested interest in not just saying nothing the Pentagon or the administration might object to, but to support the war and/or how it was being conducted.

Certainly, no one can say that none of these officers ever offered viewers their own unvarnished views. But how likely is it that a retired officer, trying to win a contract for a defense firm, will go on the air and say the Pentagon or the administration had done anything wrong?

<h2>As for the Pentagon, once upon a time in America we believed that things like torture and covert propaganda aimed at U.S. citizens were wrong, and that only the bad guys did them.</h2>

Live and learn.

We, the people own the broadcast airwaves. The broadcast license revewals are under our control, of the broadcast radio and TV stations owned by the corporate media that did this, and who are now failing to report AT ALL....what has happened, and what they knew, when they knew it, and whether or not they followed their own policieis with regard to vetting the possible confliccts of interests of news consultants who they employ, quote, and put in front their network microphones to speak, should have been reported about, as soon as the NY Times article appeared in print, especially since the networks have failed to do it for the past seven years. Their braodcast licenses, all of them, should be pulled and auctioned to new bidders non-related to the current license holders. That is what would happen in a country where the people seriously valued the first amendment we are protected by, and who own and regulate that broadcast bandwidth spectrum that we own, control, and regulate.

roachboy · 05-10-2008, 07:11 PM

this is amazing---so there ae folk here who actually believe that the infotainment that they inhale by way of the major television networks is reliable?

that makes me laugh and laugh.

the article which appeared in the ny times a couple weeks ago that is the center of the thread is not in dispute by anyone--the problem is that for some reason the conservative set here...it's not even that they don't believe the information..they don't care: they **want** to be sold a war in the guise of analysis of that war. they **want** to be manipulated so long as they agree with the premise around which that manipulation is built--so for the conservative set, perhaps this sort of thing is the way in which information should be--no friction, no problems, just the world mirrored back to you as you want to see it. no need to think critically--you know the information is problematic and can rely on some facile sarcasm to accomodate it, all the while avoiding having to think too much about much of anything beyond assent. how nice the world is that correponds to your fantasies...

i think the term for that is infantile, an inability to distinguish between inner and outer.

clearly the problem is host.

at this point, having nothing nice to say at all after this, i will just stop.

ottopilot · 05-10-2008, 07:29 PM

Sorry roachboy. Because you are not on FOX news, "we" cannot believe or trust your commentary. "Everyone" knows that "we" only repeat or form opinions "as seen on TV".

host · 05-10-2008, 07:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

this is amazing---so there ae folk here who actually believe that the infotainment that they inhale by way of the major television networks is reliable?

that makes me laugh and laugh.....

....clearly the problem is host.

at this point, having nothing nice to say at all after this, i will just stop.

I owe an apology to the entire forum... Studying all of this since the middle of April, and suspecting it even before that, makes me feel very alone. I grew up in a time when people took for granted that the <a href="http://www.leechvideo.com/video/view1309010.html">"most trusted man in America" had all of our backs</a>. He would not have sat silently by and let the broadcast news network he worked for, get away with what is happening now. We were spoiled by his integrity. I am sorry that I still, these days, was expecting way too much of the successors of the "most trusted man." It turns out that they are not fit to shine his shoes, much less fill them.

We are truly all on our own now. Kinda scary, the change....

Quote:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/C.../contents.html

Public Opinion

by Walter Lippman
Published 1921

Chapter XV Section 4

The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. They met the important people. They have responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist. Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables.

It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

Ustwo · 05-10-2008, 07:30 PM

Ustwo : Oh nice Ustwo you are so nice, nice, we must'ent post in thread we promised, promised the nice moderator we would nots be postings.

Ustwo

: Lies, cheats! They don't know what we must tells them, they must know!

Ustwo : No be nice, be kind, theys are young, theys have had, different, experiences, we must not points out things like this, it serves no purposes!

Ustwo

: NO WE MUSTS RUB THEIR NOSES IN IT WE MUST MAKE THEM SUFFER!

Ustwo : YES YES SUFFER! Noes waits! We must wait....wait to post, wait....

host · 05-10-2008, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Shauk you are one of the 9/11 was a big conspiracy people, you will have to pardon me if I don't take your side on this one either. I believed you thought it was obvious to anyone with 'half a brain'.

I concur.

What do you think of NBC's news anchor, Brian Williams, UStwo? Do you think he demonstrates the kind of integrity and truthfulness exhibited by CBS's Cronkite, in February, 1968?

ottopilot · 05-10-2008, 07:42 PM

At that very moment, Cronkite ushered in the era of creating the news rather than reporting the news.

wait for it ... wait for it ... not much longer ... must type furiously ... truth to power ... ahhhhhhhh

Shauk · 05-10-2008, 08:03 PM

because being properly informed about 9/11 and the integrity of the people who bring us our news aren't related in any way whatsoever huh Ustwo?

host · 05-10-2008, 08:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopilot

At that very moment, Cronkite ushered in the era of creating the news rather than reporting the news.

wait for it ... wait for it ... not much longer ...

No, ottopilot. Cronkite was fresh from an unimbedded in person trip through Vietnam when he gave his assessment of the US prospects at the end of his news broadcast on Feb. 27, 1968.

These are some Time magazine pieces from Jan, and Feb., 1968:

Quote:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...837665,00.html
Under a Cloud in Saigon
Friday, Jan. 12, 1968

Brooding over the Viet Nam war last September, Newsweek's Saigon Bureau Chief Everett G. Martin had some harsh words for the Vietnamese. In a two-page piece for his magazine, Martin charged that the Vietnamese troops performed so poorly on their own that they should be completely integrated with U.S. forces. The U.S., he went on, should also take a much more active role in governing South Viet Nam, from channeling all economic aid to ousting corrupt Vietnamese officials. "What right do the Vietnamese have to expect full sovereignty," he asked, "while depending for their very survival on U.S. support?"

Although Martin's recommendations are almost completely opposite to U.S. plans or inventions, the Saigon government and press took great offense. Saigon newspapers charged Martin with being a "colonialist," and demanded his expulsion. One paper ran a poem accusing him of every known vice and concluding: "You s.o.b., and your father and your mother and all your family and all your ancestors." More direct action was also threatened. Getting word that ARVN soldiers planned to sack the villa in which Newsweek is quartered, Martin had bars put on the windows.

The attack never came, but last week another sort of retaliation did. After his return from a vacation, Martin was told that his visa would not be renewed. Though a few journalists have been denied entrance visas, he was the first correspondent to be seriously threatened with expulsion since the fall of the Diem regime in 1963. But by week's end, under pressure from the U.S. embassy, the government reversed the order and indicated that it would let Martin stay. As a reminder of its displeasure, though, it refused to clear the latest issue of Newsweek, forcing the distributor to withhold all 3,000 copies.

Quote:

Thin Green Line
Friday, Feb. 23, 1968

Once again the U.S. had to separate fond hope from grim fact. On successive days, the Johnson Administration announced that reinforcements would be sent immediately to South Viet Nam and that the latest rumors about peace feelers from Hanoi had added up to nothing. As if to underscore the news, Communist forces over the weekend launched a savage new offensive across South Viet Nam.

The winter so far has been marked by the familiar progression of incongruities: worldwide speculation about imminent peace talks, yielding to carnage, followed in turn by further hints of negotiations. The most recent talk about talks became intense in late December and early January, when the North Vietnamese said officially that they would agree to discussions if the U.S. stopped bombing North Viet Nam. Washington followed up with a deep probe of Hanoi's intentions. The chief question throughout was whether Hanoi would give assurances that it would not militarily exploit a bombing cessation. This demand was part of the "San Antonio formula" laid down by Lyndon Johnson in September and later denned as meaning that Hanoi should not increase its infiltration rate of South Viet Nam beyond existing levels.

Fiercely Exasperated. The diplomatic exploration grew in drama and widened in scope. Washington employed a still-anonymous foreign intermediary to sound out officials in Hanoi last month, meanwhile suspending bombing in the Hanoi-Haiphong region. Italy's Foreign Minister Amintore Fanfani met with North Vietnamese envoys in Rome, sent Washington a lengthy report of Hanoi's views. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant jetted to New Delhi, Moscow, London and Paris, arriving back in Manhattan last week. Hanoi made an other gesture—plainly calculated, no matter how welcome—by releasing three captured U.S. flyers.

Johnson, meanwhile, kept repeating that he would begin a conference "tomorrow" if possible and that he would consent to whatever initial agenda the other side might propose. The President also invited Thant to Washington this week to "thank him very much for another try." In fact, the Administration was fiercely yet helplessly exasperated by Hanoi's skillful use of inconclusive peace hints as a psychological counterweight to its bloody assaults on South Viet Nam. Furthermore, Communist propagandists in South Viet Nam assiduously spread the word that the U.S. was conniving with the North to sell out the Saigon regime and establish a coalition government that would include the Viet Cong.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk bluntly set the record straight: "At no time has Hanoi indicated publicly or privately that it will refrain from taking military advantage of any cessation of the bombing. Nor has it shown any interest in preliminary negotiations to arrange a general cease-fire." Lyndon Johnson added at an impromptu press conference at the White House that Hanoi is no more ready "to negotiate today than it was a year ago, two years ago or three years ago," and the Communists' attacks throughout South Viet Nam proved it.

New enemy thrusts were under way (see THE WORLD) as Johnson flew to North Carolina and California for a personal goodbye to some of the 10,500 soldiers and Marines being dispatched to Viet Nam. The reinforcements will bring total U.S. military strength in the country to 510,500, allowing General William Westmoreland greater flexibility in deploying his troops to defend the cities and the besieged northern provinces. The new men are being rushed to Asia, said the Pentagon, "for insurance purposes."

The insurance is doubtless necessary, but the premiums will prove difficult to pay. The extra expense can only heighten the Government's fiscal difficulties.

Of more pressing concern is the shortage of trained troops. The Administration insisted that reinforcements will not add to the 525,000 total already scheduled to be in Viet Nam by July, but are merely an acceleration of the buildup. Westmoreland has made no official request to exceed the ceiling of 525,000—that is, not yet. However, no one will be surprised if the general does ask for more men, and gets them: he is already strapped for combat-ready ground units.

Ready Baclc-Up. The troops now being sent are from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and the Marine Corps' 5th Division—the most mobile and professional outfits remaining in the U.S.-based strategic Reserve. This leaves intact just three regular Army divisions—committed to NATO and not organized for fast deployment to underdeveloped countries—plus most of a Marine division and six Army brigades dispersed from Alaska to the Canal Zone. Many of the men now en route to Viet Nam have been there before, and some have not even enjoyed the usual two-year respite between combat tours. To prevent the thin green line from getting thinner still, the Administration may well have to put major Reserve ground components on active-duty status for the first time since the Berlin crisis of 1961. These forces would not necessarily be sent to Viet Nam, but would serve as a ready back-up in the event of emergency elsewhere.

Many senior officers have believed for some time that the Administration will inevitably have to draw on the Army National Guard and Reserve as well as the Marines' standby division. The Administration had hoped to avoid this disruptive measure, giving in only last month when it mobilized 14,000 airmen. A call-up of ground elements could well be more painful because a typical Guard division of some 14,000 men, for instance, is concentrated in one state, whereas the smaller air units are well distributed geographically. Among other possible steps to ease the shortage of trained forces would be an extension of tours of duty in Viet Nam and a lengthening of service for two-year draftees. Such proposals now under consideration are politically hazardous, however, especially in an election year and at a time when Congress is increasingly dyspeptic.

Outwitted. The Senate, particularly, continues to scorch the Administration with criticism. Kentucky Republican Thruston Morton last week accused the Administration of "bland and probably inaccurate statements" about the war. By Morton's count, the number of antiwar Senators has grown from ten to 25 in the past year. One of that number is Illinois Republican Charles Percy, who is now asking a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Viet Nam, leaving the South Vietnamese government to survive or expire on its own. Ohio Democrat Stephen Young demanded that Westmoreland be replaced by "a more competent general" because he has been "outwitted and outgeneraled."

On the House side, Wisconsin Republicans Glenn Davis and Vernon Thomson predicted that Westmoreland would be fired by Easter. The general, after four grueling years in Viet Nam, is due for relief, and Johnson does not rule out his return. Nevertheless, the President insisted: "I have no intention of seeing him leave. I have no plan for him to leave."

Marching Orders. If recent developments in Viet Nam have failed to rally Congress, the public at large seems to be reacting differently. Opinion polls show that approval of Johnson's handling of the war remains low. Support of the war itself, however, seems to have risen since the Communists' Tet offensive. The Gallup survey periodically asks people to classify themselves as hawks or doves. Since January, the self-described hawks have increased from 56%, to 61%, and the doves have decreased from 28%, to 23%. The latest Louis Harris survey found that those expressing general support for the war have increased from 61% in December, to 74%. Yet even Johnson, the indefatigable poll watcher, insisted last week that "you can't run a war by polls."

Nor can a war be run—or at least well run—as long as the other side can repeatedly determine when and where the action is to be. Johnson responded to Westmoreland's latest request for help with determination, giving the marching orders just 48 hours after the general's message arrived. Yet once again the U.S. was on the defensive, reacting to the enemy's initiative.

Do you prefer a muzzled, compliant press like we enjoy in this country, now, ottopilot? I don't. I want an independent press that tells me what is actually happening from the perspective of what it's reporters can find out, without quotes from anonymous sources and without blatant conflicts of interests. As long as they don't report deployed troop numbers, movements and positions and yet to be executed battle plans, I want REAL reporting about a war that the US military is involved in, not faked, bought staged presentations...

What do you prefer, ottopilot, Cronkite or Brian Williams?

loquitur · 05-10-2008, 08:11 PM

roachboy, considering that I don't watch TV and get most of my news from the NY Times, you're making an awful lot of assumption about how other people arrive at conclusions. Infantile, indeed. Methinks you need a mirror on that one. People can disagree with with you and be just as adult and intelligent as you - and if you think they can't, then the juvenility is not theirs.

host · 05-10-2008, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur

roachboy, considering that I don't watch TV and get most of my news from the NY Times, you're making an awful lot of assumption about how other people arrive at conclusions. Infantile, indeed. Methinks you need a mirror on that one. People can disagree with with you and be just as adult and intelligent as you - and if you think they can't, then the juvenility is not theirs.

Two posts from you here now.....How about your take on this? Do you see the total on-air silence from the network news outlets, even refusing to speak about the controversy on a PBS news story reporting on it, a sign that they've all "lawyered up"? Do you disagree that a motivated public outcry could make broadcast license renewal an expensive problem for these network owned stations?

Ustwo · 05-10-2008, 08:19 PM

Bah I keep letting myself get sucked into this...

It couldn't have been better if it were a troll thread at doing that, my hats off.

ottopilot · 05-10-2008, 08:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

What do you prefer, ottopilot, Cronkite or Brian Williams?

While choosy mothers choose Jiff, and 4 out of 5 doctors recommend Tylenol, I prefer ottopilot!

Those other guys? ... it doesn't matter. I take neither seriously as unbiased news sources. The news "business" is just that... a business. Make of that what you will ... at least keep it entertaining this late at night.

Remember not to say NO! to MOM on mothers day.

PSY-OPS or PSY-CLOPS? A Coincidence?

dc_dux · 05-10-2008, 09:12 PM

otto...you honestly dont see anything wrong with an administration that provides special briefings to former military personal (some with financial interests with defense contractors) for the purpose of having them serve as military analysts for the media and creating an appearance of objectivity in order to regurgitate Pentagon talking points and present favorable (not necessarily factual) news coverage of the war in Iraq?

At the very least, shouldnt these analysts (and their media hosts) have disclosed their "special" relationship with the Pentagon?

Or would you prefer just to continue with your mom jokes?

host · 05-10-2008, 09:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

otto...you honestly dont see anything wrong with an administration that provides special briefings to former military personal (some with financial interests in defense related industries) for the purpose of having them serve as military analysts for the media and creating an appearance of objectivity in order to present favorable (not necessarily factual) news coverage of the war in Iraq?

Or would you prefer just to continue with your mom jokes?

dux, again, and again, you and I prove that there can be no coherent two sided discussion among folks with diverse views here. Why do they post here in politics? It seems with an intent to mock, ridicule, and to sabotage the discussion that could, but does not happen.

I think it is worse than you described it, dux. From the Pentagon released email in the thread's OP:

Quote:

....CURRENT ISSUES:
I
The key issue here is that more and more, media analysts are having a greater impact
I
on the television media network coverage of military issues. They have now become the geI
to guys not only on breaking storys. but they influence the view5 on issues. Th~y also h.ave a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively I I with regards to military....

.....We can also do more proactive engagement with thiB list and give them tips
on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on upcoming issues as they are I
I developing. By providing them with current and valuable information, they become the key
go to guys for the networks and
<h3>it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts I
I by the networks themselves....</h3>

The intent of the "PSY-OP" seems to be to choose the stories that the media will report on, in the way that the pentagon wants them reported, and to script the military industrial complex investors/board members who they've represented as military "analysts", chosen by the networks while "weeding out" those analysts who disagree with the pentagon scripting, marginalizing them by refusing to brief them, until they have no influence with the networks and leave the stage permanently.

Result: A unified message delivered by cooperative shills for the pentagon who are also financially tied to defense contractors and neocon partisan lobbying groups.

I can't decide if the "PSY-OP" is worse than the networks ignoring the conflicts of the analysts who they contract, or if the lockdown by the networks of this story of the network's betrayal of the public trust and FCC licensing violations committed by the networks is worse. They've given us military sponsored and controlled INFOMERCIALS while telling us they were still reporting the news....like Cronkite, Huntely-Brinkley, and Frank Reynolds used to do....

I would be surprised that the pentagon and the networks could act this boldly, but the behavior and words of a number of my fellow TFP members, over the past 44 months, helps convince me that not many notice or care too much about the extra effort of corporate and government leadership to transfer wealth, power, and our constitutional protections from us to themselves. Too much information....too much to read and keep track of. Not worth it, apparently.

roachboy · 05-11-2008, 04:25 AM

there's a number of ways to look at this general issue---personally, i think the op is framed in a narrow way on it because the simple fact of the matter is that television--and by extension the "free" press--is an ideological co-ordinating mechanism. the interests of a news outlet can be summarized (at a remove) as:selling advertising; instantiating itself as a medium that relays infotainment in order to legitimate itself in order to enable its functions as advertising delivery system; the delivery of versions of the world on a routine basis; the versions of the world are enframed by a direct institutional interest (above) and a secondary interest, which is in placing itself as a mediation between viewers and the world; as a mediation between viewers and the world, television is in a position to co-ordinate opinion both at the registers of what is seen (and not seen) and by how it is framed, both as information stream and as topics for "debate" which are the space within which the range of "legitimate" political opinion is elaborated, its parameters set, etc.

if you connect the advertising delivery system and infotainment delivery system functions, they converge on the structuring of desire through the structuring of relations to the world.

these functions do not require a conspiracy theory to explain--they may or may not all be explicit motives on the part of actors within the media apparatus--but socially, this is a way to understand what the medium does--and by socially, i mean functionally.

viewers as consumers of objects advertised lean on viewers as consumers of the medium which offers the advertisement.
viewers as consumers of objects advertised are most likely to act on the advertising consumed in situations which are not understood as crisis.
so television has a structural interest in minimizing crisis.
news as an advertising delivery system relies on an assumption of transparency, so presents a world as discontinuous, as shot through with continuous disruption, and so as a seemingly endless sequence of disturbances.
disturbances and the footage of it activate a kind of voyeurism--crisis implicates the voyeur in a manner that runs counter to the dynamic--disturbance activates a range of responses which are functional for advertising--crisis undercuts the relation to advertising itself.

television has a structural interest in introducing disturbance and in minimizing implications at once. the routine scenario is that of a melodrama--disturbance, assertion of order, resolution, residuum.
crisis is not melodrama.

think for a minute about the way the iraq war has and has not been covered as a sequence of possibilities for activation and redirection by television as advertising delivery system. the erasure or minimization of crisis--in this case the political implications of the war in iraq, which by any rational standard should have by this point issued into a generalized political Problem, should have undercut the basic legitimacy not just of the administration but of the political order that enables it---because if a war launched under false pretenses and them managed with utmost incompetence is not a cause for political Problems, if it does not undermine the legitimacy of the administration and of the political order which holds it in place DESPITE the war in iraq, than what WOULD be a crisis that draws the legitimacy of the political order into question?

and if there is no crisis that could possible draw the legitimacy of the political order into question, that means that popular sovereignty means nothing, because there is no situation in which it could possible be exercised.

and so you can see the outlines of the american form of soft totalitarian politics, with television as a de facto co-ordinating mechanism at its center.

if any of this is true, then the biggest Problem television (as a whole) could face is the exposure of its complicity in the process of ideological co-ordination. television itself shoudl appear neutral so its functions can unfold across a relation that is confused with freedom (not in the political sense--in the sense of a freely-chosen relation). if television is implicated in the co-ordination process, it becomes particular. if television becomes particular, it segments viewers, looses them. better to interpellate in general.

i think this is why the massive silence over the ny times story that revealed the tip of the iceberg of marketing war by revealing the relations between pentagon "public diplomacy" (marketing war) and the networks.

i don't see any way around the conclusion that television is such a co-ordinating mechanism--it seems to me self-evident.

i think that the only way you can not understand this is to not look.
one of the more bizarre features of conservative politics of the past 15 years has been the projection "the liberal media" which seems to enable a kind of selective acknowledgment of the co-ordinating functions on the part of conservatives which enables them to rationalize even more narrow and explicit forms of co-ordination as somehow "a response" while at the same time to put aside the fact of co-ordination. this is the space of an infantile relation to the world.

all this to explain the post above, loquitor.
it isn't really about you.

reconmike · 05-11-2008, 04:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopilot

While choosy mothers choose Jiff, and 4 out of 5 doctors recommend Tylenol, I prefer ottopilot!

Those other guys? ... it doesn't matter. I take neither seriously as unbiased news sources. The news "business" is just that... a business. Make of that what you will ... at least keep it entertaining this late at night.

Remember not to say NO! to MOM on mothers day.

PSY-OPS or PSY-CLOPS? A Coincidence?

Nice logo Otto, is that for the great Dan Rather? Funny that no one has mentioned him here.
Why is that? You people sat and sucked up everything he spit out, where is the difference?

And Host please stop calling people traitors, ya know pot meet kettle.

dc_dux · 05-11-2008, 04:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reconmike

Nice logo Otto, is that for the great Dan Rather? Funny that no one has mentioned him here.
Why is that? You people sat and sucked up everything he spit out, where is the difference?

I assume Rather was not mentioned because it is old news and not really relevant to the current issue under discussion...other than to those who do not want to discuss the use of biased analysts (or analysts protecting a personal financial interest) presented to the public as objective.

But since you insist, on the one hand, you have an anchor who presented a story that he could not fully and accurately source....and subsequently taken off the air (and his career shattered).

As opposed to dozens of former military officers presenting themselves to the public as objective military analysts, yet regurgitating Pentagon talking points on Iraq, whether true or not......and further, not revealing their financial connections to DoD contractors.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ’surrogates’ who could be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions.’

Special Pentagon access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

According to the conservative Judicial Watch, such actions could be against the law:

Quote:

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (22 U.S.C. ' 1461), forbids the domestic dissemination of U.S. government authored or developed propaganda or “official news” deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/4303.shtml

While the article refers to earlier Pentagon (Rumsfeld/'04-05) actions, it may apply to these recent actions as well even though these analysts were not "hired" by the Pentagon.

When DoD misleads the American people by having them believe that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals are simply replaying DoD talking points, the department is clearly betraying the public trust.

The actions may also be in violation of specific language in annual DoD appropriation bills:

Section 8001 of the yearly Defense Appropriations bills signed into law has made clear that "No part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by the Congress."

The DoD is reported to have hired a private contractor to monitor and track the public comments of these military analyst surrogates. As one of them put it, this was "psyops on steroids."

The other legal question is if any DoD contract awards were influenced as a result of the "on air" analysis of these former military officers? (The military analysts involved reportedly represent more than 150 military contractors competing for the hundreds of billions of dollars of defense contracts.)

Rather engaged in shoddy journalism....but did nothing that was potentially illegal.

ottopilot · 05-11-2008, 06:37 AM

Why would anyone here ever assume that the news has not been manipulated?

Out of the hundreds or thousands of stories generated daily, why do we only see the stupid shit we see on a daily basis? Marketing, message, demographics, all geared to reach specific audiences to make tons of money, influence social trends, and managing all the little sheep to perpetuate the status quo. Why is this such a eureka moment for the self-proclaimed big-picture-people? An actual sense of perspective might help put it all together, but you'd have to jump off the idealogical rumba-line to see it.

Last I checked, we all have the freedom to be content with network news. We have the freedom to explore multiple news sources. We also have the freedom to change TV channels or use the on/off switch. Is the government going to save the stupid and intellectually-myopic from themselves by further regulation? Will it be in the form of "truth to power"? And if so, who regulates that bullshit?

If the crimes of Brian Williams and the "military industrial complex" are so apparent, then I look forward to their swift prosecution. They can get in line behind the Bush impeachment. I want them all to twist and burn. It makes for great drama and distraction ... a perfect backdrop to carry on the propaganda and PSY-OPS (PSY-CLOPS?) of the evil neocons.

dc_dux · 05-11-2008, 06:40 AM

Otto....I didnt think you would get it or would find a way to rationalize it.

There is a reason we dont have a Ministry of Information in the US

Military briefers are one thing....the government (aided by the networks) intentionally misleading the American people by having them believe that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals are simply regurgitating DoD talking points (whether they are valid or not) is something entirely different.

I dont know if its criminal...it certainly is unethical.

Hey but thanks for taking down that false quote you had attributed to Obama in your signature....at some level, perhaps you do understand it is wrong to promulgate knowingly false or deceptive information!

ottopilot · 05-11-2008, 06:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

Otto....I didnt think you would get it or would find a way to rationalize it.

Hey but thanks for taking down that false quote you had attributed to Obama in your signature....at some level, perhaps you do understand it is wrong to promulgate knowingly false or deceptive information!

What "it" are you referring to? I think this is exactly my point. You're so deep in to the ideology supporting your argument, that you can't recognize "it".

I thought I'd spare you further anguish on the Obama quote. It served it's purpose at the time. Sort of like my avatar.

dc_dux · 05-11-2008, 07:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopilot

What "it" are you referring to? I think this is exactly my point.

It = a government (aided by the networks) misleading the American people by promoting the false impression that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals have been asked by the DoD (and the analysts agreeing -without disclosing that agreement) to simply regurgitate DoD talking points (and that they also have financial ties to defense contractors that they failed to mention).

Why is that so hard to understand?

Quote:

You're so deep in to the ideology supporting your argument, that you can't recognize "it".

I could just as well say that you are so deep in denial that you cant recognize it.

So I guess its a stalemate

ottopilot · 05-11-2008, 07:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

It = a government (aided by the networks) misleading the American people by promoting the false impression that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals have been asked by the DoD (and agreed) to simply regurgitate DoD talking points (and that they also have financial ties to defense contractors that they failed to mention).

Why is that so hard to understand?

I could just as well say that you are so deep in denial that you cant recognize it.

So I guess its a stalemate

Start your own network. Why don't you grasp the fact that commercial news is FOR SALE? I think you do, but you don't want to acknowledge something in contrast to your position. Sort of like:

Quote:

Originally Posted by dc_dux

to promulgate knowingly false or deceptive information!

dc_dux · 05-11-2008, 07:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ottopilot

Start your own network. Why don't you grasp the fact that commercial news is FOR SALE? I think you do, but you don't want to acknowledge something in contrast to your position.

Commercial news networks, ie, the public airwaves, were never intended to serve as a defacto Ministry of Truth and Information....at least not in the US.

I understand that you find it acceptable...I dont.

mixedmedia · 05-11-2008, 10:39 AM

I see the modus operandi now...

Problem: can't contradict the facts?

Step 1: Insult host.

Step 2: Minimize the argument.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Ustwo · 05-11-2008, 10:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

I see the modus operandi now...

Problem: can't contradict the facts?

Step 1: Insult host.

Step 2: Minimize the argument.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

No, he started with an insane premise.

I think a military/civilian conservatives coup may have already taken place, and the news that the TV networks are not reporting is that they and the coup plotters are the winners, and the rest of us have already lost!

This shit belongs in paranoia where it can be ignored or ridiculed properly.

dc_dux · 05-11-2008, 11:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

No, he started with an insane premise.

I think a military/civilian conservatives coup may have already taken place, and the news that the TV networks are not reporting is that they and the coup plotters are the winners, and the rest of us have already lost!

This shit belongs in paranoia where it can be ignored or ridiculed properly.

Ustwo, you think this shit is paranoia?

step 1: DoD invites select group of former military officers to private briefings

step 2: DoD provides talking points for use with the media

step 3: DoD instructs former miilitary officers not to disclose they had private briefings and to present talking points as their own opinions

step 4: Former military officers have financial interests in potential $millions (or $billions) in defense contracts and comply with DoD request, offering themselves to the media as objective analysts

step 5: Media takes the offers with no vetting process and presents the former military officers as objective analysts and fail to disclose any relationship between the analysts and DoD or potential conflict of financial interest of the analysts

I think its attempting to manage the message and deceive the public....initiated by DoD and sustained (even after knowing the facts) by the media.

mixedmedia · 05-11-2008, 11:04 AM

Well, perhaps.

It's a premise I have been known to speculate about myself. And, in fact, have called it a conspiracy theory on my own. Just from my own observation of people and a certain dichotomy of political viewpoints that seem too unnatural and consistently held to be chance. But then, I'm just another old school liberal nutjob.

But on the same note, I don't recall folks going on and on and on...and on and on and on about a 'liberal media conspiracy' being told to take their comments out of the politics forum.

But, personally, I'm finding the disparaging comments about host to be more tiresome than just about any political topic, mundane or fanciful, that I can think of. I mean, jesus people, get a new fucking schtick, alright?

host · 05-11-2008, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

No, he started with an insane premise.

I think a military/civilian conservatives coup may have already taken place, and the news that the TV networks are not reporting is that they and the coup plotters are the winners, and the rest of us have already lost!

This shit belongs in paranoia where it can be ignored or ridiculed properly.

Uhhhh.....Ustwo.... I don't know what else to fucking describe what is happening. What would happen if you woke up one morning and thoughts entered your head that ALL of your politics...everything and everyone who you have supported politcally during your adult life..... reduce you to being a hollowed out tool of these PSY-OPS?

Ustwo, what do you think was behind the effort to insert Otto Reich into the Bush administration in 2001, a new commitment to open government? Do you value or want open government or your constitutional protection FROM government, Ustwo?

Quote:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1076
Extra! September/October 2001

Scandal? What Scandal?
Bush's Iran-Contra appointees are barely a story

By Terry J. Allen

Throughout the summer of 2001, the media were profligate with resources for the Chandra Levy story, excavating every corner of her and Rep. Gary Condit's past to unearth a prurient bounty of personal detail. That level of investigative vigor mighthave exposed far more vital information had it been applied to Bush's appointment of numerous Iran-Contra veterans to key posts.

But with a few admirable exceptions, news stories about Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte and Otto Reich have largely relied on past reporting and he-said, she-said soundbites by the usual supporters and critics, rather than in-depth investigations into their complicity in one of the bloodiest scandals of the past 20 years. And their guilt is based not on speculation or gossip, but on hard evidence that they aided torturers and death squads,circumvented Congress and the Constitution, and deceived the American people.

"President Bush," the Washington Post reported on March 25, "is quietly building the most conservative administration in modern times, surpassing even Ronald Reagan in the ideological commitment of his appointments, White House officials and prominent conservatives say."

It's not that Bush is whispering the names of nominees too softly for the press to hear. Rather, the reporting itself is, for the most part, quiet.

Three nominations that should have raised a noisy clatter from the nation's presses are:

John Negroponte, as ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, covered up human rights abuses by the CIA-trained Battalion 316. He is Bush's choice for U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and, as Extra! went to press, was expected to clear Senate confirmation hearings.

Elliott Abrams, an assistant secretary of state under Reagan, pleaded guilty in 1991 to two counts of withholding evidence from Congress (i.e., lying) over his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Bush I pardoned him; Bush II has appointed him to the National SecurityCouncil as director of its office for democracy, human rights and international operations. The post requires no Senate approval.

Otto Reich's nomination as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, the top post for Latin America, was predicted to draw the most congressional fire. Reich was head of the now-defunct Office for Public Diplomacy (OPD), which the House Committee on Foreign Affairs censured for "prohibited, covert propaganda activities" (Washington Post, 10/11/87).

Iran-Contra redux

Washington spent more than $4 billion on El Salvador in the ’80s, backing wildly brutal regimes and their death squads against a leftist insurgency. The 12-year civil war left 75,000 Salvadorans dead--overwhelmingly civilians killed by U.S.-supported forces. As Reagan's assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, and later for inter-American affairs, Elliott Abrams, in his own words, "supervised U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean" (Ethics and Public Policy Center). He helped cover up one of the worst atrocities of the war: a Salvadoran army massacre in El Mozote that left 800 to 1000 civilians dead.

In Nicaragua, after the leftist Sandinistas overthrew the U.S.-supported dictator in 1979, Washington created and funded the Contras, a guerrilla army that concentrated its fire on civilians. The Reagan administration escalated the civil war after the leftist Sandinista party won an election endorsed as free and fair by international monitoring agencies. In a campaign to tarnish the Sandinistas and gild the Contras, Otto Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy pressured U.S. media and planted ghostwritten articles and editorials. The comptroller-general of the U.S., a Republican appointee, found that the OPD had violated a ban on domestic propaganda.

Under Ambassador John Negroponte, neighboring Honduras grew so crammed with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the U.S.S. Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground for the Contra war. While poverty raged, U.S. military aid jumped from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. The Honduran army, especially the U.S.-trained Battalion 316, engaged in widespread human rights abuses, including kidnapping, torture and assassination. Negroponte worked closely with the perpetrators and covered up their crimes, according to Ambassador Jack Binns, his predecessor in the post (In These Times, 2/28/01).

Spurred on by media reports and popular protests against U.S. intervention in Central America, Congress passed the Boland amendment, which cut off most military aid to the Contras. Undaunted, the Reagan administration circumvented Congress and popular outrage by waging a covert war and raising money for the Contras from private and foreign sources. One of the "neat ideas" Oliver North and his cronies concocted was to funnel profits to the Contras from the secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran--which was under embargo after seizing Americans as hostages. The discovery of this and other illegal schemes led to the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Negroponte, Abrams and Reich played key roles.

Writing for history

With the 1990s, aside from the occasional hurricane or bus plunge, the media spotlight shifted away from Central America. Still, a few investigative reports took advantage of new evidence and time-loosened tongues. Mark Danner revisited the El Mozote massacre for The New Yorker (12/6/93), documenting as well Washington's success in trashing the original reporting on the slaughter by Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermopietro.

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun undertook a months-long investigation into the U.S. role in Honduras, implicating Negroponte. Under editor John Carroll, Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson reported (6/27/95) that members of the U.S.-trained Battalion 316 used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." Cohn and Thompson showed that despite insistent denials, Negroponte had to have known.

In his independent magazines The Consortium and iF, Bob Parry relentlessly investigated the period, while many reporters and scholars drew on the documentation accumulated by Tom Blanton and Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive. The importance of all this work is evidenced by how often it is cited--not always with credit--in reporting on the nominations of Abrams, Negroponte and Reich.

Condensed soup reporting

Investigations of the nominees, when they are served up at all, have been mostly condensed like canned soup into a bland palatable broth. A few op-eds, including one by Mary McGrory (Washington Post, 7/8/01), have been scathing, but added little new information.

Some exceptional reports on Negroponte were notable for actually including investigative journalism. Los Angeles Times reporters Maggie Farley, Norman Kempster and T. Christian Miller--under the lead of editor John Carroll, who had moved from the Baltimore Sun--wrote a devastating exposé on the ambassador's role (5/7/01). They were the first journalists to note a possible connection between Negroponte's nomination and the deportation from the U.S. and Canada of several Hondurans connected to human rights abuses. The most notorious was Gen. Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a founder of Battalion 316. The L.A. Times quoted unnamed officials who said that "the speed of his removal was unprecedented," and speculated that the desire to make Discua unavailable for testifying at Negroponte's confirmation hearings was a factor in his hasty deportation.

Built on historical record and contemporary interviews, Sarah Wildman's March 19 piece for the New Republic was a well-documented refutation of Negroponte's claims of innocence. She concluded by characterizing the diplomat as having "not exactly the moral sensibility you want in a U.N. ambassador."

The Baltimore Sun updated its 1995 investigation with a March 7 story bluntly describing Negroponte as "a retired career diplomat who helped conceal from Congress the murder, kidnapping and torture abuses of a CIA-equipped and -trained Honduran military unit."

Most of the media have not been as diligent. For months after Negroponte's name was floated for U.N. ambassador, virtually the only mention of his Honduras record in the New York Times was a paragraph inside Jane Perlez's May 27 piece on how Sen. James Jefford's defection would impact Bush's foreign policy. Perlez noted "obstacles" to Negroponte's confirmation, "largely over his role as ambassador in Nicaragua [sic] in the Reagan administration, when he carried out the covert strategy to crush the leftist Sandinista government." As Ronald Reagan said after a 1982 trip to Latin America, "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries" down there. The Times ran a correction (6/5/01).

The Times eventually weighed in on June 14 with a front-page piece by Marc Lacey that reviewed Negroponte's career. Lacey often fell back on vague language and passive voice: "The Central Intelligence Agency several years ago found that serious rights violations in Honduras were not properly reported to Washington during Mr. Negroponte's tenure. Most of the report is blacked out, and the unclassified parts raise questions about Mr. Negroponte without providing answers."

On August 1, the New York Times finally got around to addressing the reappearance of so many Iran-Contra figures in the administration. A piece by Christopher Marquis led with an insider description of some of the Iran-Contra cold warriors clustered at a party, smirking over the controversy their nominations have raised and dismissing concerns over their suitability as "the other side…still fighting the old battles." Like the Lacey article, Marquis's reporting added no substantive background information on the nominees or the policies they carried out. To its credit, the article explored the effect of the nominations might have on Latin America. Oddly, however, Marquis quoted only the opinions of U.S. officials and experts.

As of the beginning of August, however, the Washington Post still hadn’t found it newsworthy that someone nominated for a U.N. ambassadorship has been accused of condoning and covering up human rights violations. With no apparent irony, both the Washington Post (5/13/01) and the New York Times (5/9/01) speculated that one reason the U.S. was knocked off the U.N. Human Rights Commission was that Negroponte's nomination had not been approved.

As Extra! went to press, neither the Post nor the Times has mentioned Negroponte's connection to Battalion 316. The international edition of Time (5/21/01), but not the U.S. version, simply cited the Baltimore Sun and L.A. Times to illustrate that the nomination "has revived unsettling questions." NPR's Tom Gjelten (6/11/01) offered the vague and decorous assessment that "Negroponte's critics say he was so anxious to protect the Contras and their military allies in Honduras that he covered up human rights abuses there."

Hope for war criminals

News reporting on Elliott Abrams has been so sparse and pallid as to give hope to war criminals everywhere. Like Negroponte, Abrams maintains ignorance when not boasting that his policy was a "fabulous achievement" (Washington Post, 3/21/93).

A few outlets have written strong editorials, particularly the Philadelphia Inquirer's scorched-earth description (7/11/01) of Abrams as a "deceitful, scheming coddler of Latin American tyrants," and "uncontrite peddler of lies."

Most news stories, however, have simply noted the appointment and mentioned Abrams convictions for withholding evidence from Congress--as if he were a minor player haunted by sins of omission. They’ve ignored his cover-ups of the Salvadoran army's massacre at El Mozote and assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Except for reporting in The Nation (7/2/01) and a piece by this reporter in In These Times (8/6/01), few publications have reprised Abrams' role in Iran-Contra.

On February 8, 1982, Abrams told a Senate committee that the reports of hundreds of deaths at El Mozote "were not credible," and that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas."

It's not as if hard evidence and gruesome details of Abrams' knowledge and culpability are difficult to find. The man was convicted in open hearings and remains brazenly unrepentant. He called his prosecutors "filthy bastards," the proceedings against him "Kafkaesque" and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee "pious clowns," according to an article in Legal Times (5/30/94). Raymond Bonner broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in the New York Times (1/27/82). The story also ran in the Washington Post (3/5/82). Post reporters Guy Gugliotta and Douglas Farah (3/21/93) further documented Abrams’ role in El Salvador in a 1993 story.

That was then. This time around, Post’s news columns have barely mentioned the nomination or El Mozote. Aside from the August 1 overview article, the New York Times' coverage was confined to a 150-word piece (7/6/01) announcing the appointment, noting Abrams' run-in with Congress and describing him blandly as "a prominent figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s."

Perhaps the Times is still gun shy. After pressure from the State Department and attacks from other media, executive editor A.M. Rosenthal lost faith in Bonner’s original El Mozote reporting and ordered him back to the Metro desk. That kind of pressure on the media later became the specialty of Otto Reich, George W. Bush’s choice to be the top State Department official for Latin America.

Mightier than the pen

As head of the Reagan administration's Orwellian Office of Public Diplomacy, Reich ran "Operation 'White Propaganda.'" He and other OPD officials regularly showed up in newsrooms and editorial meetings to excoriate reporters and editors for unfavorable coverage and to slander insufficiently sympathetic reporters. <h3>The OPD planted stories and op-eds in the U.S. media that were ghostwritten by Reich's operatives or assigned to "independent" experts. Tainted articles ran in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, among other outlets.</h3> His office also engaged in such dirty tricks as charging that reporters in Nicaragua were paid for their anti-U.S. coverage with the services of Sandinista-supplied prostitutes. Jason Vest's 7,000-word piece on the American Prospect website (5/25/01) offers the most extensive account of Reich's attempts to influence the U.S. media.

Reich himself visited executives and reporters at CBS where, according to a 1984 memo from Secretary of State George Shultz to Ronald Reagan (In These Times, 4/16/01), he "privately and confidentially" influenced coverage of the Salvador war. "Everyone at CBS has been cordial and cooperative," the memo noted, adding that this example of OPD activities "has been repeated dozens of times over the past few months."

Reich had help from his friends. According to a staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (9/7/88), "senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department channels."

According to Eric Alterman in The Nation (5/7/01), old habits die hard. After the New York Times assigned Bonner to cover Reich's nomination, Reich tried to have the reporter taken off the story. The Times ran the March 8 article by Bonner and Christopher Marquis on page 6. Like Karen DeYoung's piece a month later (4/15/01) for the Washington Post, it devoted a few workmanlike paragraphs Reich's questionable activities as head of OPD. Both articles discussed the policy implications of appointing an anti-Castro ideologue and detailed potential conflicts of interest raised by Reich's lobbying for corporations including Bacardi-Martini and Lockheed Martin.

Ink on his hands

While Negroponte, Abrams and Reich were all deeply implicated by an Iran-Contra policy that resulted in serious human right violations, coverage of Reich has been the somewhat more extensive.

There are several possible explanations. Unlike Abrams, whose appointment needs no congressional approval, Reich’s State Department post requires Senate confirmation, an opportunity for opposition that gives the story legs. (Negroponte’s post also requires a Senate vote, but as the Senate has already approved him for several ambassadorships since his Honduras post, reporters may have sensed less potential for conflict.)

Another key factor in the quality of coverage is the easily accessible postings on Reich by the National Security Archive. In 15 minutes, even the busiest or laziest journalist can download enough damning documentation to satisfy any editor.

And not to be discounted in the differential reporting is the propensity of journalists to take more personally activities, like those of the OPD, that tarnish the myth of an independent media. Negroponte and Abrams have blood on their hands. Reich's are mostly smeared with ink. Negroponte and Abrams coddled torturers, protected death squads and helped kill peasants in Central America. Reich messed with the U.S. media.

Today Reich’s kind of plotting hardly seems worth the effort--with media resources squandered on titillating gossip, while real muck goes mostly unraked.

Terry J. Allen reported from Central America during the 1980s. Her articles have been published in the Boston Globe, In These Times, Salon.com, Harper's and TheNation.com, as well as various international outlets. She can be contacted at tallen@igc.org .

http://news.google.com/archivesearch...34946125709480

http://news.google.com/archivesearch...ves&hl=en&um=1

"If you look at it as a whole, the Office of Public
Diplomacy was carrying out a huge psychological operation, the kind the
military conduct to influence the population in denied or enemy territory,"

Quote:

HTML Version:
http://209.85.215.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=3&gl=us
[PDF]
Iran-Contra's Untold Story
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML

Page 12

....To drum up support for Reagan's Nicara-
gua policy, North worked closely with several
groups, including the National Endowment
for the Preservation of Liberty (NEPL) and
IBC in 1985 and 1986. Even after Congress
approved $100 million in
contra
aid in August
1986, Casey and Raymond deliberated on how
to press the administration's advantage. Ray-
mond's August 7, 1986, memo to Casey sug-
gested that the cIA director's close friend, the
advertising specialist Peter Dailey, could
"help coordinate private sector activities such
as funding that currently cannot be done by
either CIA or State." (Dailey said in an inter-
view that he did not take on that job because
he became a full-time eonsuhant to Casey at
the CIA.)
<h3>Reich's staff literally policed the
airwaves, monitoring major news
outlets for offending items and
taking action against the journal-
ists who deviated from the Reagan
line.</h3>
In an interview, one "private" participant
in the public diplomacy strategy said that a
key advantage to using outside groups was
that their assessments were viewed as more
objective than those of the Reagan administra-
tion. This source noted that once in 1986, the
office of Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., then Speaker
of the House and a staunch
contra
opponent,
unsuspectingly sought the advice of an aca-
demic whose critical report on Nicaragua had
been sponsored by the Gulf and Caribbean
Foundation.
North's private-sector operatives were espe-
cially active in challenging human rights
reports that documented
contra
atrocities.

Page 17 (Bottom...+

Miami Herald,. another public diplomacy offi- ..... ro, [Arturo] Cruz, and [Alfonso] Robelo ..... candidly admitted in a July 19, 1987,. Miami ...
http://fparchive.ceip.org/Ning/archi...y_kornblub.PDF

To staff the S/LPD, Reich drew on Defense
Department personnel with intelligence expe-
rience. One, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel
("Jake") Jacobowitz, who served as Reich's
executive officer, had a "background in psy-
chological warfare," S/LPD Deputy Director
Jonathan Miller told the
Iran-contra
commit-
tees. After a request from Reich to Raymond,
five other army psychological operations spe-
cialists from Fort Bragg in North Carolina
were recruited for the office. One of them
would "also be looking for exploitable themes
and trends, and [would] inform us of possible
areas for our exploitation," Jacobowitz wrote
in a May 30, 1985, memorandum to Reich. "If
you look at it as a whole," <h3>an S/LPD official
candidly admitted in a July 19, 1987,
Miami

19.

Page 18
FOREIGN POLICY
Herald
article, "the Office of Public Diploma-
cy was carrying out a huge psychological
operation, the kind the military conduct to
influence the population in denied or enemy
territory."</h3>
At taxpayers' expense, the public diplomacy
apparatus engaged in covert propaganda and
high-pressure lobbying of Congress. Adopting
a routine CIA tactic in covert propaganda
operations abroad, the S/LPD planted stories
in the media while concealing their gov-
ernment sponsorship. In a classified May 13,
1985, memo to Patrick Buchanan, then the
president's director of communications, Miller
boasted of ongoing "white propaganda" opera-
tions that were placing anti-Sandinista opin-
ion articles in leading newspapers. One ap-
peared in the
Wall Street Journal
on March 11,
1985; it was authored by a Rice University
history professor, John Guilmartin, Jr., who,
Miller said in the memorandum, had "been a
consultant to our office and collaborated with
our staff in the writing of this piece ....
Officially, this office had no role in its prepa-
ration." "I merely wanted to give you a flavor
of some of the activities that hit our office on
any one day," wrote Miller, who resigned
from the government after disclosures in the
Iran-contra
hearings that he had helped cash
contra
travelers checks from North's safe.

What is the difference if they train the guns of a regiment of artillery on the American people, and then fire volley after volley at them....or if they do these PSY-OPS, in terms of their impact on the relationship of the people with their military and the civilian authority commanding it?

What if you are one of the casualties, Ustwo....but instead of experiencing a limb blown off by an artillery volley, they've succeeded in stealing your opinions and your proper allegiances...the ones the US constitution were intended to preserve for you, and not for government or the military?

RetroGunslinger · 05-11-2008, 12:14 PM

Let me just get this straight:

The government is sending in their own plants as opposed to objective military analysts in order to make the war seem better than it really is and to keep national morale up as best as they can.

Is this the gist of what's going on?

host · 05-11-2008, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RetroGunslinger

Let me just get this straight:

The government is sending in their own plants as opposed to objective military analysts in order to make the war seem better than it really is and to keep national morale up as best as they can.

Is this the gist of what's going on?

Much worse....the broadcast networks hire retired military officers as "consultants". The networks represented these officers as apolitical military experts....technicians who could describe what was happening in the run up to and during ongoing military operations. Actual independent investigative reporting revealed that most of these officers had investments in and seats on boards of directors of military contractors poised to reap hundred of billions of dollars in military contracts revenue. Two generals, the ones consulting for NBC news, were founding members of a group of 25 principles lobbying the congress to invade Iraq and remove Saddam via US military force.

The newly disclosed emails, available on the pentagon's website, show that the (link in this thread's OP) pentagon was intent on shaping the networks stories about the military and the war, and recognized that the military analysts could actually control which stories the Networks covered, as well as the slant. The pentagon would brief these consultants, monitor what they said on the news broadcasts, and shut out consultants who were disagreeable to the military's propaganda....by denying them briefings, and by influencing the networks to fire them.

After the NY Times reported all of this last month, all of the privately owned on-air networks have avoided reporting any of this. On his blog, NBC news network anchor, Brian Willaims, whose nightly show had the highest ratings of any nightly news show during the period from 2002 to 2007, claimed the two generals his show featured, were apolitical, "fine men", when the truth is that they were heavily invested in defense contractors, held board seats on some of these companies, were two of the 25 founding members of the neocon group actively lobbying congress to invade Iraq, and were receiving briefings from the DOD reserved for cooperative former military officers only.

Brian Williams wrote that he did not check the backgrounds of the generals, and did not see a conflict that his viewers should have or should now be informed of, but he has reported nothing about this in any broadcast.... and neither have any of the other network news broadcast outlets....

Quote:

http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/ar...29/958477.aspx

By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor

....A few of you correctly noted I’ve yet to respond to the recent Times front-page article on the military analysts employed by the television networks, including this one.

I read the article with great interest. I've worked with two men since I've had this job -- both retired, heavily-decorated U.S. Army four-star Generals -- Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. As I'm sure is obvious to even a casual viewer, I quickly entered into a close friendship with both men. I wish Wayne were alive today to respond to the article himself.

I made four trips to Iraq with Wayne. We were together, in close quarters, for over two months at the start of the war and survived at least one harrowing adventure. I won't attempt to respond on Wayne’s behalf, and I know Barry McCaffrey has his own response to the article.

All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. I knew full well whenever either man went on a fact-finding mission or went for high-level briefings. They never came back spun, and never attempted a conversion. They are warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians. .....

....I think it's fair, of course, to hold us to account for the military analysts we employ, inasmuch as we can ever fully know the "off-duty" actions of anyone employed on an "of counsel" basis by us. I can only account for the men I know best. The Times article was about the whole lot of them -- including instances involving other networks and other experts, who can answer for themselves. At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers. I think they are better men than that, and I believe our news division is better than that.

Since the following has been public for five years, while Brian Williams continued to pimp these two "hoes", Williams needs to be fired and NBC needs to have all of their broadcast licenses transferred by the FCC to some other broadcasters who exhibit actual integrity:

Quote:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030421/interns
TV's Conflicted Experts
By Daniel Benaim, Priyanka Motaparthy & Vishesh Kumar

This article appeared in the April 21, 2003 edition of The Nation.
April 3, 2003

...One might have expected a pro-military slant in any former general's initial estimation of the US invasion. But some of these ex-generals also have ideological or financial stakes in the war. Many hold paid advisory board and executive positions at defense companies and serve as advisers for groups that promoted an invasion of Iraq. Their offscreen commitments raise questions about whether they are influenced by more than just "a lifetime of experience and objectivity"--in the words of Lieut. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a military analyst for NBC News--as they explain the risks of this war to the American people.

McCaffrey and his NBC colleague Col. Wayne Downing, who reports nightly from Kuwait, are both on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a Washington-based lobbying group formed last October to bolster public support for a war. Its stated mission is to "engage in educational advocacy efforts to mobilize US and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein," and among its targets are the US and European media. The group is chaired by Bruce Jackson, former vice president of defense giant Lockheed Martin (manufacturer of the F-117 Nighthawk, the F-16 Fighting Falcon and other aircraft in use in Iraq), and includes such neocon luminaries as former Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle. Downing has also served as an unpaid lobbyist and adviser to the Iraqi National Congress, an Administration-backed (and bankrolled) opposition group that stands to profit from regime change in Iraq.

NBC News has yet to disclose those or other involvements that give McCaffrey a vested interest in Operation Iraqi Freedom. McCaffrey, who commanded an infantry division in the Gulf War, is now on the board of Mitretek, Veritas Capital and two Veritas companies, Raytheon Aerospace and Integrated Defense Technologies--all of which have multimillion-dollar government defense contracts. Despite that, IDT is floundering--its stock price has fallen by half since March 2002--a situation that one stock analyst says war could remedy. Since IDT is a specialist in tank upgrades, the company stands to benefit significantly from a massive ground war. McCaffrey has recently emerged as the most outspoken military critic of Rumsfeld's approach to the war, but his primary complaint is that "armor and artillery don't count" enough. In McCaffrey's recent MSNBC commentary, he exclaimed enthusiastically, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and... the Bradley fighting vehicle," and added for good measure that the "war isn't over until we've got a tank sitting on top of Saddam's bunker." In March alone, IDT received more than $14 million worth of contracts relating to Abrams and Bradley machinery parts and support hardware.

Downing has his own entanglements. The colonel serves on the board of directors at Metal Storm Ltd., a ballistics-technology company that has contracts with US and Australian defense departments. The company's executive director told the New York Times on March 31 that Metal Storm technologies would "provide some significant advantage" in the type of urban warfare being fought in Iraq.....

,,,,The networks don't seem too concerned about what the analysts do on their own time. "We are employing them for their military expertise, not their political views," Elena Nachmanoff, vice president of talent development at NBC News, told The Nation. She says that NBC's military experts play an influential role behind the scenes, briefing executive producers and holding seminars for staffers that provide "texture for both on-air pieces and background." Defense contracts, she adds, are "not our interest.",,...

Brian Williams and NBC have still disclosed none of the above, and five years after the information above was published we have Williams, in writing, misleading us about all of these condlicts of interests of Downing and McCaffrey, bur he admits in writing that he has not broadcast a word of his written lies.....

05-10-2008, 03:34 PM	#2 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	Ok, self edit, I'll just let this one burn out on its own. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. Last edited by Ustwo; 05-10-2008 at 03:56 PM..

05-10-2008, 05:38 PM	#5 (permalink)
MuadDib Psycho	Does this belong in Tilted Politics or Tilted Paranoia? __________________ "The courts that first rode the warhorse of virtual representation into battle on the res judicata front invested their steed with near-magical properties." ~27 F.3d 751

05-10-2008, 05:44 PM	#6 (permalink)
Shauk Confused Adult Location: Spokane, WA	it belongs in "read the artcles and figure it out yourself" as per usual I think host tend to overwhelm and over-estimate the attention span of the average person on this forum. to put everything together because the rest is redundant imo http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/wa...ll&oref=slogin thats really the only thing he needed to link. and heres the follow up, roughly a week later http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...57C0A96E9C8B63 Translation: Oh hey, sorry bout that, we'll look in to it for you. Last edited by Shauk; 05-10-2008 at 05:59 PM.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

05-10-2008, 06:10 PM	#7 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	snark removed Last edited by loquitur; 05-10-2008 at 06:28 PM..

05-10-2008, 07:01 PM	#9 (permalink)
ottopilot let me be clear Location: Waddy Peytona	I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it (my medication) anymore... __________________ "It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

05-10-2008, 04:58 PM	#4 (permalink)
Lindy Junkie	Tiresome, as usual. Lindy

05-10-2008, 06:29 PM	#8 (permalink)
Shauk Confused Adult Location: Spokane, WA	and people fucking fail at reading comprehension again. NEWS and MEDIA are methods of mass transmission. The message you put out over this method gets to many many many families and individuals. You have "analysts" with an agenda offering their "oh so impartial" opinion of what the U.S. Military/Goverment "should" do across this medium, and the lesser educated, or, oh fuck, even the equally educated types who are trusting them to have thought this through to it's full realization, are going to agree with the assessment, and maybe even quote you on it, and thus, propagation of the agenda ensues. Mind over matter. If they have your minds, they will have your allegiance.

05-10-2008, 07:11 PM	#11 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	this is amazing---so there ae folk here who actually believe that the infotainment that they inhale by way of the major television networks is reliable? that makes me laugh and laugh. the article which appeared in the ny times a couple weeks ago that is the center of the thread is not in dispute by anyone--the problem is that for some reason the conservative set here...it's not even that they don't believe the information..they don't care: they want to be sold a war in the guise of analysis of that war. they want to be manipulated so long as they agree with the premise around which that manipulation is built--so for the conservative set, perhaps this sort of thing is the way in which information should be--no friction, no problems, just the world mirrored back to you as you want to see it. no need to think critically--you know the information is problematic and can rely on some facile sarcasm to accomodate it, all the while avoiding having to think too much about much of anything beyond assent. how nice the world is that correponds to your fantasies... i think the term for that is infantile, an inability to distinguish between inner and outer. clearly the problem is host. at this point, having nothing nice to say at all after this, i will just stop. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-10-2008, 07:29 PM	#12 (permalink)
ottopilot let me be clear Location: Waddy Peytona	Sorry roachboy. Because you are not on FOX news, "we" cannot believe or trust your commentary. "Everyone" knows that "we" only repeat or form opinions "as seen on TV". __________________ "It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

05-10-2008, 07:30 PM	#14 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	Ustwo : Oh nice Ustwo you are so nice, nice, we must'ent post in thread we promised, promised the nice moderator we would nots be postings. Ustwo : Lies, cheats! They don't know what we must tells them, they must know! Ustwo : No be nice, be kind, theys are young, theys have had, different, experiences, we must not points out things like this, it serves no purposes! Ustwo : NO WE MUSTS RUB THEIR NOSES IN IT WE MUST MAKE THEM SUFFER! Ustwo : YES YES SUFFER! Noes waits! We must wait....wait to post, wait.... __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. Last edited by Ustwo; 05-10-2008 at 07:48 PM.. Reason: Personality conflict.

05-10-2008, 07:42 PM	#16 (permalink)
ottopilot let me be clear Location: Waddy Peytona	At that very moment, Cronkite ushered in the era of creating the news rather than reporting the news. wait for it ... wait for it ... not much longer ... must type furiously ... truth to power ... ahhhhhhhh __________________ "It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo Last edited by ottopilot; 05-10-2008 at 08:22 PM..

05-10-2008, 08:03 PM	#17 (permalink)
Shauk Confused Adult Location: Spokane, WA	because being properly informed about 9/11 and the integrity of the people who bring us our news aren't related in any way whatsoever huh Ustwo?

05-10-2008, 08:11 PM	#19 (permalink)
loquitur Junkie Location: NYC	roachboy, considering that I don't watch TV and get most of my news from the NY Times, you're making an awful lot of assumption about how other people arrive at conclusions. Infantile, indeed. Methinks you need a mirror on that one. People can disagree with with you and be just as adult and intelligent as you - and if you think they can't, then the juvenility is not theirs.

05-10-2008, 08:19 PM	#21 (permalink)
Ustwo Pissing in the cornflakes	Bah I keep letting myself get sucked into this... It couldn't have been better if it were a troll thread at doing that, my hats off. __________________ Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. Last edited by Ustwo; 05-10-2008 at 08:24 PM..

05-10-2008, 09:12 PM	#23 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	otto...you honestly dont see anything wrong with an administration that provides special briefings to former military personal (some with financial interests with defense contractors) for the purpose of having them serve as military analysts for the media and creating an appearance of objectivity in order to regurgitate Pentagon talking points and present favorable (not necessarily factual) news coverage of the war in Iraq? At the very least, shouldnt these analysts (and their media hosts) have disclosed their "special" relationship with the Pentagon? Or would you prefer just to continue with your mom jokes? __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire Last edited by dc_dux; 05-10-2008 at 09:33 PM..

05-11-2008, 04:25 AM	#25 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	there's a number of ways to look at this general issue---personally, i think the op is framed in a narrow way on it because the simple fact of the matter is that television--and by extension the "free" press--is an ideological co-ordinating mechanism. the interests of a news outlet can be summarized (at a remove) as:selling advertising; instantiating itself as a medium that relays infotainment in order to legitimate itself in order to enable its functions as advertising delivery system; the delivery of versions of the world on a routine basis; the versions of the world are enframed by a direct institutional interest (above) and a secondary interest, which is in placing itself as a mediation between viewers and the world; as a mediation between viewers and the world, television is in a position to co-ordinate opinion both at the registers of what is seen (and not seen) and by how it is framed, both as information stream and as topics for "debate" which are the space within which the range of "legitimate" political opinion is elaborated, its parameters set, etc. if you connect the advertising delivery system and infotainment delivery system functions, they converge on the structuring of desire through the structuring of relations to the world. these functions do not require a conspiracy theory to explain--they may or may not all be explicit motives on the part of actors within the media apparatus--but socially, this is a way to understand what the medium does--and by socially, i mean functionally. viewers as consumers of objects advertised lean on viewers as consumers of the medium which offers the advertisement. viewers as consumers of objects advertised are most likely to act on the advertising consumed in situations which are not understood as crisis. so television has a structural interest in minimizing crisis. news as an advertising delivery system relies on an assumption of transparency, so presents a world as discontinuous, as shot through with continuous disruption, and so as a seemingly endless sequence of disturbances. disturbances and the footage of it activate a kind of voyeurism--crisis implicates the voyeur in a manner that runs counter to the dynamic--disturbance activates a range of responses which are functional for advertising--crisis undercuts the relation to advertising itself. television has a structural interest in introducing disturbance and in minimizing implications at once. the routine scenario is that of a melodrama--disturbance, assertion of order, resolution, residuum. crisis is not melodrama. think for a minute about the way the iraq war has and has not been covered as a sequence of possibilities for activation and redirection by television as advertising delivery system. the erasure or minimization of crisis--in this case the political implications of the war in iraq, which by any rational standard should have by this point issued into a generalized political Problem, should have undercut the basic legitimacy not just of the administration but of the political order that enables it---because if a war launched under false pretenses and them managed with utmost incompetence is not a cause for political Problems, if it does not undermine the legitimacy of the administration and of the political order which holds it in place DESPITE the war in iraq, than what WOULD be a crisis that draws the legitimacy of the political order into question? and if there is no crisis that could possible draw the legitimacy of the political order into question, that means that popular sovereignty means nothing, because there is no situation in which it could possible be exercised. and so you can see the outlines of the american form of soft totalitarian politics, with television as a de facto co-ordinating mechanism at its center. if any of this is true, then the biggest Problem television (as a whole) could face is the exposure of its complicity in the process of ideological co-ordination. television itself shoudl appear neutral so its functions can unfold across a relation that is confused with freedom (not in the political sense--in the sense of a freely-chosen relation). if television is implicated in the co-ordination process, it becomes particular. if television becomes particular, it segments viewers, looses them. better to interpellate in general. i think this is why the massive silence over the ny times story that revealed the tip of the iceberg of marketing war by revealing the relations between pentagon "public diplomacy" (marketing war) and the networks. i don't see any way around the conclusion that television is such a co-ordinating mechanism--it seems to me self-evident. i think that the only way you can not understand this is to not look. one of the more bizarre features of conservative politics of the past 15 years has been the projection "the liberal media" which seems to enable a kind of selective acknowledgment of the co-ordinating functions on the part of conservatives which enables them to rationalize even more narrow and explicit forms of co-ordination as somehow "a response" while at the same time to put aside the fact of co-ordination. this is the space of an infantile relation to the world. all this to explain the post above, loquitor. it isn't really about you. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

05-11-2008, 06:37 AM	#28 (permalink)
ottopilot let me be clear Location: Waddy Peytona	Why would anyone here ever assume that the news has not been manipulated? Out of the hundreds or thousands of stories generated daily, why do we only see the stupid shit we see on a daily basis? Marketing, message, demographics, all geared to reach specific audiences to make tons of money, influence social trends, and managing all the little sheep to perpetuate the status quo. Why is this such a eureka moment for the self-proclaimed big-picture-people? An actual sense of perspective might help put it all together, but you'd have to jump off the idealogical rumba-line to see it. Last I checked, we all have the freedom to be content with network news. We have the freedom to explore multiple news sources. We also have the freedom to change TV channels or use the on/off switch. Is the government going to save the stupid and intellectually-myopic from themselves by further regulation? Will it be in the form of "truth to power"? And if so, who regulates that bullshit? If the crimes of Brian Williams and the "military industrial complex" are so apparent, then I look forward to their swift prosecution. They can get in line behind the Bush impeachment. I want them all to twist and burn. It makes for great drama and distraction ... a perfect backdrop to carry on the propaganda and PSY-OPS (PSY-CLOPS?) of the evil neocons. __________________ "It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

05-11-2008, 06:40 AM	#29 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	Otto....I didnt think you would get it or would find a way to rationalize it. There is a reason we dont have a Ministry of Information in the US Military briefers are one thing....the government (aided by the networks) intentionally misleading the American people by having them believe that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals are simply regurgitating DoD talking points (whether they are valid or not) is something entirely different. I dont know if its criminal...it certainly is unethical. Hey but thanks for taking down that false quote you had attributed to Obama in your signature....at some level, perhaps you do understand it is wrong to promulgate knowingly false or deceptive information! __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire Last edited by dc_dux; 05-11-2008 at 06:54 AM.. Reason: added pic

05-11-2008, 10:39 AM	#34 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	I see the modus operandi now... Problem: can't contradict the facts? Step 1: Insult host. Step 2: Minimize the argument. Wash, rinse, repeat. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

05-11-2008, 11:04 AM	#37 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	Well, perhaps. It's a premise I have been known to speculate about myself. And, in fact, have called it a conspiracy theory on my own. Just from my own observation of people and a certain dichotomy of political viewpoints that seem too unnatural and consistently held to be chance. But then, I'm just another old school liberal nutjob. But on the same note, I don't recall folks going on and on and on...and on and on and on about a 'liberal media conspiracy' being told to take their comments out of the politics forum. But, personally, I'm finding the disparaging comments about host to be more tiresome than just about any political topic, mundane or fanciful, that I can think of. I mean, jesus people, get a new fucking schtick, alright? __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

05-11-2008, 12:14 PM	#39 (permalink)
RetroGunslinger eats puppies and shits rainbows Location: An Area of Space Occupied by a Population, SC, USA	Let me just get this straight: The government is sending in their own plants as opposed to objective military analysts in order to make the war seem better than it really is and to keep national morale up as best as they can. Is this the gist of what's going on? __________________ It's a rare pleasure in this world to get your mind fucked. Usually it's just foreplay. M.B. Keene