Beware the Government-Media Complex
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Retired military officers act as Pentagon media machine
"Members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated,” Barstow wrote. “Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.”
The Times sued the Defense Department to get access to thousands of e-mail messages, transcripts and records about private briefings and trips to Iraq and Guantanamo.
The records revealed a concerted effort to deploy the analysts to blunt news coverage that was critical of the Bush Administration’s military operations.
Media outlets do not hold these analysts to the same ethical standards that prohibit full-time journalists from engaging in business activities that would conflict with their coverage. Many analysts have close connections to military contractors trying to win government business.
Fox used the greatest number of analysts involved in the Pentagon effort. However, NBC, CNN, CBS and ABC also used these analysts.
The list of analysts was approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who met with the group repeatedly. When David H. Petraeus became commanding general in Iraq last year, one of his early meetings was with the analysts.
A 2005 internal memorandum, obtained by the Times, shows why interest went so high up. Written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, the memo noted the analysts’ impact on network news coverage. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.
http://news.muckety.com/2008/04/21/retired-military-officers-act-as-pentagon-media-machine/2281
The Military-Media Complex
Monday, April 21, 2008; 8:53 AM
Talk about marching orders.
John Garrett, a retired Army colonel and a Fox News military analyst, was in regular touch with the Pentagon as President Bush prepared to announce his Iraq troop surge last year.
"Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay," Garrett wrote. That note was one of numerous documents published yesterday in a lengthy New York Times investigation of the close ties between the parade of former officers who serve as television analysts, Defense Department officials who feed them information, and corporations who hire them to win federal contracts.
It's hardly shocking that career military men would largely reflect the Pentagon's point of view, just as Democratic and Republican "strategists" stay in touch with aides to the candidates they defend on the air. But the degree of behind-the-scenes manipulation--including regular briefings by then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials -- is striking, as is the lack of disclosure by the networks of some of these government and business connections.
With an aura of independence, many of the analysts used their megaphones, and the prestige of their rank, to help sell a war that was not going well. Not all marched in lock step, of course, and a half-dozen former generals broke with the Pentagon in 2006 to call for Rumsfeld's resignation. But the networks rarely if ever explored the outside roles of their military consultants.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in an interview yesterday that the former officers are "highly educated, experienced in their field. To suggest they could be puppets of the Defense Department is a little insulting to all of them. . . . Not all of them are advocates for everything the department is doing." The department, he added, provides information not just to retired officers but to corporate, educational and religious leaders as well as journalists.
Marty Ryan, a Fox News executive producer, said yesterday that the analysts are hired not just for their expertise but also as people "who have access to and know what the thinking of the Pentagon is. That makes them valuable to us."
With so many military commentators retained in wartime, "it's a little unrealistic to think you're going to do a big background check on everybody," Ryan said. "Some of the business ties aren't necessarily relevant when you're asking them about a specific helicopter operation."
The credibility gap, to use an old Vietnam War phrase, was greatest when these retired officers offered upbeat assessments of the Iraq war even while privately expressing doubts.
Defense officials arranged for a number of the analysts to visit Iraq in September 2003, the Times reported. "You can't believe the progress," retired Gen. Paul Vallely, then a Fox analyst, told viewers, although he told the Times that he recognized at the time that "things were going south."
Ken Allard, a retired colonel and former NBC military analyst, told the Times there was a "night and day" difference between what Pentagon briefers told him and the deteriorating conditions in Iraq. "I felt we'd been hosed," Allard said.
The article, by David Barstow, was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents obtained in a lawsuit by the newspaper.
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