US TV NEWS Refuses to Report the News That They Brainwashed You With Pentagon PSY-OPS
 

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:

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?


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

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!

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 !


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?

Tiresome, as usual.
Lindy

Does this belong in Tilted Politics or Tilted Paranoia?

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.

snark removed

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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".

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....

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 :mad: : 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 :mad: : 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....

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?

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

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?

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:

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?

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?

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.

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?

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:...ue/cbs_eye.jpg

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?

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:
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.

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.

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.

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:
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.

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.

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

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

http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/...r_minister.jpg

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!

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.
http://img.directindustry.com/images...to-p/30123.jpg

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?
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:

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.

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.

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.

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? :)

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?
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,"


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?

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....


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:

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.....

rethought this...........

wow you really can't read.

lol

To my eyes I don't see anything overtly sinister here. What I see is sophisticated public relations. What the pentagon is doing is no different than any other product or idea that is being sold to us.

The only question that comes to mind isn't that news media is in collusion rather it is, why isn't the media doing its job? It is one thing to use a spokesperson or a press release as a source but it is essential to let your viewers/readers know the potential biases of your sources. It also holds, that other sources should be sought out in support of your original source.

Brian Williams's, late April, bullshit defense of his two generals makes a laughingstock of your argument, in the face of the five years old reporting on the two generals' outrageous conflicts of interests, and Williams's admission in writing, of the fact that he still has not broadcast about the NY TImes reporting, or about the failure of NBC news to disclose the conflicting interests of the two generals, of the past six years.

You are an attorney, and I have presented a trove of evidence of violations of FCC regulations by the networks and of federal laws by pentagon officials, but you are also a conservative....so....it's host's overreaction, move along folks, noithing to see here.

I wouldn't trust Brian Williams to deliver a reliable local weather report. I don't think you even notice that the consitutional protections we enjoyed on Jan. 19, 2001, are almost all disappeared, now.

The DOD, with the help of a compliant media, have turned their PSY-OPS weapon of war on the country they are sworn to defend, and it's fine with you....it's host's problem, not yours....

Myself and at least another poster have cited and quoted the laws and regulations that have been broken, the evidence from the pentagon's own website of the Pentagon strategy to control the flow of information exclusively to those in agreement, and the financial and political conflicts of the two generals reporting as military consultants for six years, in the words of the most watched network news anchor who denies that the conflict of interests is even his business to find out about or tell his viewers about, even though the seriousness of the details of the generals' conflicts were published five years ago.

Then....you weigh in from your residence in a foreign country where no criticism of the government by the media or by anyone, publicly, is permitted, to say that you see nothing sinister here, only sophisticated PR.

A rather wide gulf between us, on this issue???

<h3>To both you guys....part of the process of reaction is not to wait until Pentagon PR flack Larry DiRita is televised sitting in Brian Williams's ole anchor chair on your screen as you view the NBC nightly news at 6:30 pm.</h3> If you aren't going to react to proof that the pentagon ran a program designed to "weed out" network military consultants who did not parrot the pentagon script on TV news, and intended to have their own pentagon briefed "water carriers" steer the networks to cover only the stories the pentagon wanted presented, only in the way the pentagon wanted them presented, what exists in your version of "the process" to prevent DiRita and the defense industry via it's pentagon controlled, board member investor generals, from simply dropping all pretenses and putting DiRita in the anchor chair?

at one level, charlatan is right--one way to see this is as a huge breakdown in journalism---the major television "news" networks did not check out their sources. whether there was collusion or not is in the air--but they did not check out the sources. period.

what i'm amazed at in the thread is that so few are even willing to acknowledge that much.

there are systemic problems with how the american major media operate--there are an illusion of critique which is of a piece with the illusion of relatively unproblematic information--and unproblematic information is central to the coherent functioning of a democratic polity. the idea is that the polity, confronted with information, is capable of deliberating and acting on what results from that deliberation. in the states, deliberation is collapsed mostly into a logic of consumer choices. in the states, "democracy" is like shopping. in the states, there is no democratic polity: and it seems that alot of folk who have posted to the thread are just fine with that--rationalize it away, pretend it isn't so--of make no coherent arguments and just attack host. personally, i think the states is a soft authoritarian state ruled by an oligarchy that engages in rituals of faction rotation every 2 years, with the major cycle unfolding every 4 years. there is little meaningful difference between the factions. there is little ideological diversity at all in the states--there is much in the way of diversity of opinion, and if you talk to people they have views that range well beyond what they are told to think--but then again they also accept the idea that the oligarchy is diversity and that faction rotation is enough and that democracy can happen with systematically distorted information.

well, it can't.

rationalize it if you like, but politically this is a fucking problem.

a soft authoritarian regime in which the official political discourse is democratic is a *problem* because it continually sows the expectations that the ideological arrangement is other than it is---at certain points, the gap separating ideology and the facts of the matter surface--this is one of them--but it is hardly unique--and what's funny is that confronted with this gap, alot of folk don't seem to care.

so we don't really have a democratic polity even, if tfp is any indication of what's abroad in the land--we have a polity made up largely of people who live in an illusion and like that illusion and know that it is an illusion, but they like the illusion, so the problem really is anyone who says that it is an illusion, not that it is an illusion.

so guys, start a new network. It's not even that costly now with web and all.

I see the issue here is that people have an "ideal" in mind for what news is supposed to be, and they are measuring the real flesh and blood institutions against the ideal and finding it wanting. Well, yeah. Of course. Most institutions are like that, mainly because they are made up of people and people are flawed.

That's why I don't get excited about most of this stuff the way host does or roachboy does. I don't expect any better. People tend to do what's good for themselves and their "in-group," however defined - and that goes for politicians, journalists, network execs, retired military, etc etc etc. It's also why I generally don't like any concentration of power that isn't subject to checks and balances.

Too shrill, I guess, but you gotta feel something to write anything about anything. I got an ancestor who, at age 80, road in an oxcart over shitty colonial new england roads, for two days in April, 1775 to respond to the Lexington alarm. What's happening on this board and in this country makes me weep, so I write to keep my eyes dry. People....WTF? You're going to lose everything, if you haven't already, but....so what?

it's funny being accused of idealism by someone who confuses hayek's market fictions with the real world.

"start your own network"--say now that's a fine suggestion. no reason to think too hard about the existing state of affairs--if you don't like this reality, buy yourself another one. that how you live your life, loquitor?

nice snark, roachboy.

you think sitting on the sidelines tossing rotten tomatoes is reality? that's all you ever offer.

As for Hayek, he does certainly seem to have worked a good deal better than Marx, hasn't he? And Friedman has triumphed over Keynes as well. So no, I don't accept your premise.

I live my life by being generous to other people and not assuming that everyone who thinks, looks or acts differently from me is stupid or evil. How about you?

that wasn't even particularly snarky, loquitor. you haven't got me even started...i'm not sure this is a game worth playing, since it's mostly about derailing the thread. personally, i'd rather the thread continue. snarkiness can wait.

o yeah-so you know i live pretty much the same way in 3-d that you say you do.
what's a little different apparently is i don't generally make stupid recommendations to other people on messageboards either because i figure it's symmetrical. different aesthetics i suppose.


and i don't derive any solace from refusing to look at the world. that too is doubtless an aesthetic matter.


and no, hayek hasn't worked so well. neither has uncle milty. and i remember reading about keynes being overthrown, but then i remembered the "free marketeers" love of military expenditure as a way of being keynesians. that made me laugh.

How could you end with that sentence? Don't you have a strong, or any sense at all....that YOU are the "checks and balances", that all of the balance of power is hanging in the balance.....a "bluff", that the other guy becomes emboldened to "call". The networks are gambling that their bluff won't be called, just as Bush and Cheney have....

You're laying the duty of bluffing on me....or not...you don't seem to care. Where on earth do you think the "checks" that provide the balance will come from? Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Washington knew where the checks came from and how to use them. Franklin said that we must hang together or we will hang separately, It takes so little to check the bluff at every turn and so much more effort, if they call the bluff and take the fucking pot !

<h3>Already, the networks think they can keep their broadcast licenses while they pull this shit, a blackout on coverage of their misleading their viewers. We have to bluff them into feeling less certain of that.....</h3>

THE REASON we even have any of this material to comment on is because of two reporting sources... a team at the NY Times in 2008, and one at The Nation magazine, in 2003, and FOIA requests of the pentagon.

If your POV becomes anymore widespread, why would the owners of either media outlet even pay their staff to come up with these reports or file the FOIA requests with the pentagon? Why would the pentagon even bother to respond.

All of that activity resulted in Glenn Greenwald of Salon, challenging NBC's Brian Williams.

Is it more likely that Williams and other networks are not talking about this controversy "on the air", because of attitudes like yours....or like mine?

host - Yes, the idea of being mislead by commercial news providers in cahoots with the "military" is not ethical behavior. If nothing legally can be done to adress this practice (if it really happened the way you presented it), and you're mad as hell and can't take it anymore, please, by all means, start your own fair and balanced network. loquitur and I have both suggested this route, and you have yet to address this suggestion.

Otto...IMO, the better and more practical solution would be for more Americans to express their outrage or concern over such practices as host has done.

And to some degree it has happened. The public outing of the Pentagon practice has resulted in the program being "suspended for further review" and has also resulted in the likelihood of congressional hearings.

Thats how the system should work...not starting your own network.

o i addressed it, otto.
it's a stupid suggestion.
let's try for a minute to make sense of it, shall we?

you appear to have a kind of facile cynicism about information streams and make no particular connection between the quality of information that is available to the public, the public's capacity to make informed judgments--not to mention political judgments--and anything about a democratic political system, no matter how shallow that system might be.

instead, you seem to think of information as a kind of retail operation like shoes or vegetables and that you can go shopping for the kind of information that you prefer to consume and like shoes or vegetables. so you are not interested in critical thinking--you're interested in being able to find information that reinforces an image of the world that you want to see---and you assume that everyone works with as shallow a relation to information as you do. with that shallow a relationship, it is no wonder that you dont connect problematic information streams to problems of democratic process.

tv doesn't tell you there is such a connection so there must not be one.
if you think there is, then start your own network.

jesus....

I don't see the illegality of what you are listing. Sorry, just don't. I do see that it is unethical on the part of the Pentagon and certainly lazy journalism on the media's part.

Public Relations, by it's nature, is not necessarily an evil thing. Put simply an organization, whether they are the Pentagon, a maker of vacuum cleaners or a film company, has a story they would like to get covered. They will do any number of things to get their story to the public via the editorial news media (as opposed to paid ads, though good campaigns will often use both). They will, issue press releases, stage press conferences, supply experts, etc.

On the "fluffy" side of things, a company that supply baking ingredients might send a baking expert to do a spot on the morning news show, giving a demonstration of how to bake using their products. On the "sinister" side, nation states like Kuwait will stage a press conference to show how their babies are being killed by an invading army in an effort to win US public opinion to supporting them.

What the Pentagon is doing is controlling their message. They want their version of events to be carried in the media. They have been stung in the past by "negative" messages that have turned public opinion against them. It is not in their interest to let this happen again. Why wouldn't they hire experts that can spread their point of view?

The issue for me sits squarely in the lap of journalism. It is their job to dig beyond the PR, beyond the spin. When they simply parrot a press release, or report a Pseudo-event as fact rather than offering alternative points of view... they are letting down their end of the balance.

It is quite easy for some to say, "start your own network". Clearly this is just a way of avoiding the issue. Quite frankly, television news is largely pap. They rarely do investigative pieces anymore. They are victim of their own success (business success). They chase ratings rather than "truth".

And Host... your comments about my current place of residence are way off base. Please stick to the issue and leave where I live out it.

....because, (the DOD didn't hire the network's retired military officers/consultants...they had press credentials, they worked for the networks, they were acting as representatives of the network press as they were being briefed by the DOD....) when DOD employees use federal funds appropriated for defense to do it, (Psy-Ops directed at a domestic, civilian population) and they restrict briefings to network news conusltants who are agreeable with their script and goals and exclude the ones who are not agreeable, these DOD employees have broken the law.

Charlatan...I posted the FCC position on the network's obligation to present "REAL" news, in an earlier post, and here is the first prosecutor, in what capacity, I don't know....who agrees with my reaction to this. I am confident that there will be more to follow. Why would former head pentagon PR flack, DiRita act like he is acting....if he has no worries?

Excerpt from Dirita's own email, provided by the pentagon, linked and displayed in this threads OP:

From the NY Times reporting, last month:

...and this was in the transcript, from the pentagon's linked page, I posted in post <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2448647&postcount=3">#3...</a>

I have information besides <a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/07767728164957616364">this</a> and this:

...that the author of this "letter" is a prosecutor:

<h3>Charlatan, </h3> every day that the US corporate owned, broadcast media continues it's co-ordinated silence on this American tragedy, and their part in it, only adds to the resolve of those who object to what is happening to diminish what our free press and government once seemed to symbolize. The internet was developed in the nick of time. I've been following current events to some degree since the launch of the soviet Sputnik satellite and the soviet downing of U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers shocked us American public in the 50's. I've never experienced anything as arrogant, destructive, unethical, and secretive as our current government.

I don't think it's possible to overreact to unfolding events. The broadcast media have set themselves apart from the NY Time's biggest story of the last six weeks. They've switched off. Unprecedented that they've made themselves irrelevant....as they made the choice to deliver the script of power instead of speaking truth to it....

I think we're just getting what we deserve.

I started to give up a long time ago.

Threads, such as this one, don't help.

Yay, misanthropy.

We're all getting exactly what we deserve.

Up the butt.

The story is over and it worked.

I'm just glad we're fighting them over there - God knows I don't want to fight 'em over here. If Iraq hadn't attacked us on 911, we wouldn't have had to drive Al Queda out from under Saddam Hussein's quid-pro-quo protection in Iraq. The thing that really pisses me off is when the press reports on all the deaths of solidiers and the small handful of thankful Iraqi citizen-patriots who die as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but leave out all the great things happening over there. All the success stories. All the lollipops and laurels and rosebuds thrown upon the freshly razed ground where cherubic children come to play and laugh at our Divinely victorious feet.

---------

charlatan: i would say a small difference is that the DoD is not, obstensibly, a private company. They are a wing of our government, and as such theoretically shouldn't be selling me a military product. I simultaneously think this is a huge issue, and yet I'm not surprised by it at all. Duplicity is expected at this point, which is a sad thing and makes me feel more jaded as time goes by.

... or

Perhaps your 3D view is really more like tunnel vision through a socialist lens. If you, host, or anyone of the self-proclaimed 3D minded would force yourselves to actually look at the larger picture, you'd understand that there are many avenues available (to boys and girls just like you and me) for changing corporate behavior that you do not agree with.

If you cut through all the bullshit, all I'm hearing is whining about how the commercial networks won't report something. It appears that the issue is caught insulated between some legal and ethical holes and will most likely not be prosecuted. I have not said once that I approve of the behavior. I never once said that I didn't think that network news is highly influential. And don't make me laugh about what the hell you believe about my need to justify my views, you are the master of shallow generalizations and rationalizations. You reach deep in to your bag of stereotypes, often based on very little information, roll it in crap, spray it with pseudo-intellectual deodorant, and deliver it so cleverly condescending.

Here's where the 3-D part of your intellect should have kicked in. The suggestion of "start your own network" is admittedly a stick in the eye, but absolutely an option if someone had the initiative and creativity to act on their convictions. Boycotts on products and viewing may also be unrealistic to the paper activist, but would be easier and less capital intensive than a new network. But like anything substantial, it would require lots of good old-fashioned hard work, and that's probably a show-stopper right there.

How many creative ways can be thought of by someone of your massive intellect to approach a solution to this problem of the free-market? Because that's what it is.

If you want more laws, get them passed (this is always the laziest and the most popular method with lib/socialists). If you want to prosecute violations of current laws, then prosecute (but that's no fun, enforcing existing laws just doesn't fill that need to save the stupid from themselves or provide that "feel good" quality satisfying one's sense of convenient righteous indignation). If those measures require too much actual work and you don't like what the network news sources don't report, then I suppose turning the channel, turning off the TV, reading a newspaper, searching the internet, starting a boycott, starting a complaint write-in campaign, would be way too much trouble. You can always just start your own network.

pig...you can read about the lollipops and laurels and rosebuds...where cherubic children come to laugh and play.....on the DoD arabic news website in Iraq:
Arabic original >>>>>>>> English (google translator)

I dont see anythring wrong with the DoD offering a news site in Iraq.....if it were more upfront about the sponsorship of the site. In the current format, I think its a bit deceptive.

otto, darling, it is obvious that you didn't understand my posts to this thread.



first off, to address your crackpot insults directed at me personally, behind roachboy:

like alot of people i work, in my modest way, to help bring down this entire order of things. you make stuff, it's a political action. you put it out into the world, it's a political action. what varies is the channels you use to make the actions, and so who interacts with the results. it is obvious that all of this involves a degree of rationalization--the gap between what one imagines oneself to be doing and what the results of that doing can effect out there in the world is a matter of readership or listenership--as you know, in your way, as i remember somewhere reading that you are or were a musician. so you know the gap that separates what you animates your relation to what you do and what you think it could or should do in the world and what it might actually do.

i am not interested beyond this in connecting my 3-d activities to this thread.
i don't need to defend anything---"what exactly do *you* do to effect the change that you want to see"---funny one internet persona asking that of another.


=================================================

on the networks: when you "strip away the bullshit" as you so daintily put it, what you strip away is the ability to make the first bit of sense of what i wrote to this thread.

i am not interested in fighting my way through reading comprehension issues in order to engage in some no doubt pointless exchange when i know up front that you don't bother to work out what an actual argument is and where it leads to--so since you did not bother to work out what i wrote, what you stripped away was the actual argument, otto, and what that left you with is what you want to see.

i dont have time to deal with reactionary narcissists. either figure out the argument and respond to it, in which case we can talk, or dont--but dont waste my time with some cheap term substitution the only function of which is to enable you to hector me about issues that are only of concern to the version of roachboy that floats around within the confines of your skull, the one that you might be able to imagine takes you seriously.



it's funny how often it turns out to be the case that the folk whose politics blab so much about individual initiative turn out to be inert particles intellectually themselves.

Perhaps I am a bit thick... did the DOD pay these network consultants (i.e. retired military types) money to be reps for the DOD or were they being paid by the networks (or both)?

From what I am gleaning here, they are not being paid by the DOD (though I admit I may have missed that bit) but rather getting access to breifings while those who present a negative POV are excluded from the breifings.

Again, I find this unethical but not illegal.

the interpretive problem that we're running across with this, charlatan, is whether co-ordination of message by the pentagon is different from private sector pr: personally, i think it is, simply because when the state acts--including by proxy/at an arm's length--it makes the situation it acts upon political.

that's why i thought it appropriate to link this story to wider questions of information and opinion management as a political question, and to link this to the sad state that of american "democracy."

so to my mind, this is not a particularly overwhelming or even surprising development (the ny times story etc.)--it's more indicative of a broader pattern of political management.

the problem for systems of ideological co-ordination systems comes when their function as ideological co-ordination systems emerges. that's why this is interesting, in my view.

as is the lack of concern about it.

Please move to Paranoia. This is just like his eight 9/11 threads which were allowed to linger here way too long.

How about waiting until after the DoD internal review and Congressional oversight investigation to determine if laws (or DoD policies and procedures) were broken regarding preferential treatment to the analysts/surrogates and defense contracting.

seaver: if you're seriously advocating that position, demonstrate that the op is false.
put up or shut up.

short of that, i will not move the thread.

<h3>Sen. Carl Levin chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee</h3>

You've been fucking "hosed", Seaver....your "belief system" has been taken apart and exposed....suck it up. Don't try to make it my problem.

I can agree that the discussion really should be one that discusses how PR is carried out by the government in general.

Levin's letter above makes the whole thing much clearer.

1) Special access given to those who would provide positive spin while denying or curtailing access to those who don't

2) Some of the analysts have were on the payroll of Defense contractors at the same time.

The first point is really just about access and who gets it. Should there be equal access to all? To answer this you need to look at the government as a whole. Who gets access to information. Who gets briefed by congress, the president, etc? Are other branches offering this sort of access while (deliberately or inadvertently) excluding others?

The second doesn't have much to do with the PR message but does have everything to do with giving Contractor X, with an analyst that has access, more information than Contractor Y that does not. This could possibly have an effect on the fairness of bidding processes (though I suspect that this is a bit of a red-herring as there are likely many other ways to get this information and it probably isn't all that relevant to the bidding process).

The key issue in point two really falls to the media. They should be disclosing any conflict of interest. Any real journalist (as opposed to an analyst) with a potential conflict would make these disclosures.

Which is why there should be an FCC investigation in addition to the DoD internal review...as requested in Cong. Dingell's letter to the Chair of the FCC:
This is not about starting your own station if you dont like what the DoD and networks did... as some have suggested with offhand comments.

It is about ensuring that laws and regulatory rules and procedures are not violated for political (or financial) purposes.

O Rly?

No, before you ask, not "O'Reilly", but "Oh? Really?" I hate that cocksucker anyway.

Back on topic: A few thoughts and questions - to which I'd like firm answers - do spring immediately to mind.

Also, I would like to point out that this thread title is (thinly) based on a single quote. I know fairly intimately what a *tactical* psyops team does. If you'd like to deem your citations as *strategic* psyops, then I think I could honestly concede that point.

That being said:

1) Are any of these "consultants"/"analysts" retired enlisted men? Like, the type who compose a vast majority of the actual military itself? And who historically make up most of those killed in any war?

I reviewed the list of the attendees of the April 18, 2006 meeting you cited. Seems like the lowliest coffee-fetching bitch in the room was likely a Navy Captain, or perhaps a retired GS-15 civilian.

2) Are you mostly upset about Iraq? Hell, I'll even give you the deceitful lie that may or may not be our current conflict in Afghanistan, which has a far, far higher percentage of international forces still in the fight.

Because personally? My biggest problem in this "gigantic ruckus" you beat to death in this thread isn't necessarily the media, or their haphazard retention of so-called "military analysts/consultants". "Apolitical" is the most bullshit word you could use to describe any "analyst" or "consultant" of any stripe who has appeared on TV or written an editorial in my young lifetime.

Dude, every major media outlet has their own fucking agenda. Print, broadcast, or on teh intarwebz, it doesn't matter. Be it Fox News or Air America (RIP), everyone's got their own story to tell, shareholders and boards of directors included.

If you wish to credibly indict the military-industrial complex, why not go after all those senior officers? Again, I point out that not one of those men you named from the April 18, 2006 meeting was enlisted.

And let's face it, an Air Force BGen who's already heavily involved in, say, the Joint Strike Fighter program could easily "retire" and start the very next day at Northrop-Grumman or McDonnell Douglas for more than double his military paycheck, with much better benefits. Personally, that seems like a far, FAR larger moral and ethical violation than going to work for CNN or some shit, regardless of the pay there. Compare the taxpayer dollars spent in either scenario... hmmm...

Perhaps I am just no longer capable of sympathy for "Joe Six Pack" who believes that "TV said it, so it must be true!"

Some of the most moronic people I know still understand that CNN is more liberal/socialist, Fox is more right wing/GOP, et cetera, et cetera. In this day and age, if nobody's spelled those nuances out to you, you're probably never going to be concerned with changing your nation's politics, anyway.

And sadly enough, any media outlet in existence is going to retain military analysts/commentators who fit their own agenda, and nobody who retired below the paygrade of O-6... maybe O-5. Because in this world, it's all about your class, caste, and education if you want credibility. In the media, at least.

The retired/retiring officers you cited are all just trying to make bigger bucks, as are the ones who hire them. Is it despicable? Hell yes. Is there anything you and I are doing about it?

Well, shit. That's a hell of a question, ain't it?

One last question: is there any "analyst/consultant" currently paid by any media outlet who is currently on active duty? Because I'm genuinely interested in those numbers, since that's pretty much chargeable under the UCMJ.

echo5delta, we got something for everyone in our "bag of tricks", this AM..... an answer to your question about former enlisted military in the ranks of the retired military consultants, working for the networks, and a little nugget for you, too, Seaver!

My question is.....does the ideology of the military establishment, polluted with their openly partisan leanings, give them, with the influence of their neocon allies....the "balls"....to actually provide the "antidote" (punishment) for the American voters electing democrats? Are they sick, sick, desparate delusional people, or are they sitll as dangerous as they've already demonstrated they can be?




<h3>Background:</h3>

There is a retired army Command Sgt. Major, (#10 On the list below, of Rumsfeld luncheon attendees....)

http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/.../enlisted.html

The American people have heard from politicians, pundits, and generals, but not, up to this point, from the average boots-on-the-ground soldier.

Today, several of those boots-on-the-ground veterans will testify about the effects of the occupation in Iraq ...at the same time that Congress debates a bill extending funding for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan through 2009.

Will these members of Iraq Veterans Against the War be treated as respected vets with an opinion based on personal experiences or treated as angry vets who disrespect their fellow troops?

Bios of the the soldiers/marines who will testify today.

Watch live on C-SPAN 3 at 9:30 am

the space occupied by the war in iraq is interesting, if you think about it: a thick veneer of denial surrounds almost everything about it, but information nonetheless circulates which blasts that veneer apart. the extent to which political opinion and particularly mobilization in the states around this is a function of information streams is a difficult question--the movement against the war collapsed when move on shifted organizational strategy and moved away from organizing at the public protest level. since then no-one has filled in the gap--meanwhile the war has kinda faded from view in a way--and this seems difficult to not see as a choice.

i am busy this morning, so i'll just leave this at the barest outline and pose the question of what is at stake in the deliberate manipulation of the nature and orientation of information concerning a policy disaster. the war in iraq is a policy disaster. sometimes it seems that the interests of the administration and that of the dominant media in the state coincide to the extent that crisis is a management problem, that all relations which matter to the commercial media operate within a context that substitutes routine disruptions and discontinuities for system crisis, and that therefore the political problems of the administration and the commercial interests of the dominant media de facto coincide in the massaging of infotainment about iraq.

this is the main reason why i think that charlatan's take, while accurate on restricted logical grounds, is problematic at the same time in that it brackets the situation itself.

gotta go.

I was purposely bracketing the issue of Iraq because I felt it necessary to look at this issue in the abstract first before dealing with the specific later. I want to understand the process of PR and government organizations and the issue of providing (potentially) insider information to those who stand to gain financially from it.

If these things are not illegal for, let's say, the agriculture department or the education department, why should they be an issue for the pentagon.

To be clear, I am not addressing the moral implications, just the legality.

i'm not sure that it makes sense to bracket iraq in this case.
i would simply argue that the situation is qualitatively different from insider trading and/or routine conflict of interest...

Charlatan....it is illegal for a federal agency to disseminate propaganda disguised as unbiased news.

<iframe height="339" width="425" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/6799214#6799214" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

The GAO found that the Bush administration acted illegal in paying news commentators to promote the No Child Left Behind program, the marriage initiative, etc. as if they were objective analysts presenting news story.

I'm not so sure I'd agree with that. Isn't the difference just a matter of scale?

As for the illegality issue, were these retired officers still on the Pentagon's payroll? I understood they were being paid by the Networks and, in some cases, by defense contractors.

It does not strike me as the same thing as the example you are using.

Charlatan, if you scroll about 85 percent of the way down the article web page, you come to this
The article is influenced by the study of the 8000 pages the NY Times sued the pentagon for release of, and from interviews with analysts and broadcast networks and pentagon officials, like Larry DiRita.

Above the excerpt, there is a repetitious account of the incentives for the analysts to cooperate with the intent of the pentagon that they help broadcast, during their network TV comments, the pentagon's messages.

The reward was also the conflict of interests. Analysts "carrying water", received exclusive briefings and invites to pentagon paid trips to Iraq and Gitmo, and to dinners where they got close to pentagon officials. These retired military ananlyst/consultants sold their relationship and proximity to pentagon officials in the US and in Iraq, via their consulting businesses, and their dual roles as lobbyists representing defense crontractors. The also invested in and served on boards of the defense contractors.

If you were "in good" with the pentagon, you could sell that to defense contractors....it's a daisy chain, Charlatan. There was no profit in disagreeing on TV with the pentagon message, and you got excluded from the briefings and from the pentagon paid for trips. The pentagon hired a consultant who monitored every comment that the consultant/analysts made in broadcasts. They presented reports on this activity to the pentagon, and the result was that those who dissatisfied the pentagon, lost their access.

All of the taxpayer money spent on this "OP", is of questionable legality, most of all the trips for the analysts at taxpayer expense and the cost of the time spent by pentagon staff and the media consultant hired to organize, communicate with, and track the consultant/analysts TV performances.

I can agree that this is fishy and feel that the biggest conflict of interest (aside from them already being retired from the military which makes their ability to be objective a bit difficult) is the fact that they are double dipping as consultants to contractors and the media. This certainly raises a lot of questions.

However, the point made in the quote, "— a clear ethical violation for most news organizations... " isn't conclusive. The key word being "most". I know, from doing PR for years, that there are some journalists and organizations that will pay their own way on a junket and there are those that will accept "freebie". Again, this is not technically illegal. To put this into perspective... did all of those embedded journalists pay for their flights to Iraq, their accommodations and every K ration they consumed? Probably not.

Personally, I think news outlets should never accept gifts or services in kind. But in practice it happens all the time.

To be clear, I am not defending their actions here. I think there is definitely something here that stinks but this is still a moral one rather than a legal one (though I think there might be something verging on illegal with the consultants that were also representing military contractors, I will wait for the report before I make up my mind).

Charlatan, I took a look at that issue when I was putting together my last post.
The rules for embedded journalists were:

(I'm not a fan of Michael Yon, but this doesn't seem obviously slanted...)
Different rules, Charlatan.... no "carry water for us or you're cut off", and no pentagon VIP tour treatment, for REAL journalists....

charlatan: is war a product?
is a state a brand that can effectively sell war?

the ethical question is not new, really---any war requires that support be generated and maintained amongst the public--but it seems to me that there is something basically wrong with shifting from a model in which this is an explicit activity undertaken by the state to a model where the state is understood as a type of corporate body which sells its policies as product, particularly war, particularly war launched on problematic grounds--particularly by selling that war not through explicitly framed official statements, but through the use of proxies that infiltrate information streams and function to blur the line between factual reporting (whatever that really is) and official propaganda.

the line seems clearest if you adopt the approach which emphasizes the nature of the polity--in a democratic political system, information has a certain status because of the way the system is supposed to operate---so the blur of official marketing and information is not only more obviously a problem framed this way, but the consequences of it emerge with a certain polemical clarity.

if you adopt a position that assumes pr as a procedure that can be applied in principle to any relation, then the same problem looks quite different, and does come, as you say, to a matter of scale or degree.

so the meta-problem has to do with the desirability of effects of adopting one approach over another to framing this ethical and maybe legal problem. this is a political matter, really (the criteria that you would use to evaluate approaches are political, in other words, and would involve argument from outcomes).

this is why i have not been willing to concede your way of framing the question at hand here to you---even though i haven't had time to make the case until now.

this seems the place where we are, though. a step prior.

I guess I am approaching this a little differently. While I can agree that selling war a product is problematic to say the least, the matter still stands that the government is always trying to sell their policies. Everything from no-smoking campaigns to the farm bill and back again. Some of the policies are easy to agree with... some are not.

There are politics in all of these issues, just not on the same scale.

Where and how does one draw the line when it comes to the government "selling" it's position on things?

I am pretty sure I would draw my line so that it doesn't include special access to ex-military officers and curtailing access to those who don't tow the party line. I am pretty sure I would draw it even tighter than that. However, it is really not a matter of what I think but what the law thinks and I am not sure this has been an illegal act. It might be but I am not sure.

well, host has presented an argument that they are illegal actions.
ultimately, to decide the matter would require a legal action and a decision, yes?

ethically, it seems to me that war is not a product but a state action and that there is a distinction in kind between the two. efforts to generate support for a war are not marketing--but they are a type of public relations, which i take as bigger than simply marketing, more like bernays described it as engineering opinion (i could be wrong about the wording--something unnerving, though)--so if you assume that generating support for an action is part of the action, it follows that public relations is an extension of war in this case. if you assume that there is a distinction between the state and a private firm, and between information and advertising, it would follow that there *should* be distinctions between political actions (marketing war is a political action by necessity as it involves the state) and private firm pr campaigns--which would obtain across the board--so for example a government representative might appear as a talking head on some goofball roundtable program and advocate the position of the moment on smoking---but he or she would be operating in a clearly marked capacity as a representative and would speak from that position---others who interact with the official position of the moment would probably treat it as one alternative amongst others and engage in an evaluative action---which is fine obviously--this gets confusing though, doesn't it--a private citizen can advocate a position symmetrical with that of the official state line of the moment and that's ok--so i guess the distinction comes down to identifying state representatives as state representatives and so marking their speech as originating from, effectively, the state.

this is clearer in the case of the "experts" who were used by the "news" networks as neutral commentary sources on matters pertaining to the war in iraq--who were effectively instruments of the bush administration--they were not identified as such, did not identify themselves as such, and this seems to me a problem. like a Problem.

it is easy peasy to manipulate public opinion if you don't make distinctions between types of information sources and present ideological positions as matters of fact. perhaps because it is so easy to do--if you control or have systematic access to the repetition machinery that shapes aspects of collective worldviews--that it bugs me that this sort of practice is happening.

particularly given the still-incessant self-congratulations in the states over how "free" everyone is politically.
this seems to me, hperbolic tho it may be just written down this way--an indication of the extent to which the states is a soft totalitarian system...no distinction between ideology and information means that the ability of the polity to make informed judgments is incapacitated. that is a form of domination.

my argument works backward from this general premise to this particular type of situation.

it's much stickier a question framed as you do it, sir.

All this stuff about the media is just flapdoodle. What's really important is that Tim Russert farted on the air on national television.

CNN and all of the other major broadcast TV networks have still not reported on the successful effort of the NY Times to convince a federal court to order the pentagon to provide documents related to it's domestic media psy-ops program, but here is CNN, this past week, without disclosure to it's viewers, disclaimer or qualification, continuing to participate in the pentagon's domestic disinformation operation: