According to Stars & Stripes:
Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters’ coverage is being graded as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”
Moreover, the documents — recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor — indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
One reporter on the staff of one of America’s pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as “neutral to positive” in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes “could possibly be neutralized” by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials. Another reporter, from a TV station, provides coverage from a “subjective angle,” according to his Pentagon profile. Steering him toward covering “the positive work of a successful operation” could “result in favorable coverage.”
The new revelations of the Pentagon’s attempts to shape war coverage come as senior Defense Department officials are acknowledging increasing concern over recent opinion polls showing declining popular American support for the Afghan war. “The purpose of this memo is to provide an assessment of [a reporter from a major U.S. newspaper] … in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on an embed mission in Afghanistan,” reads the preamble to one of the reporter profiles prepared for the Pentagon by The Rendon Group, a controversial Washington-based public relations firm.
Astounding. I hope they make this report public.
This is part of the Defense Department’s attempt to manipulate the news in the overseas operations of the War on terror, a policy that apparently crosses presidential administrations. The Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times article, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” documented this policy as it existed under the Bush Administration:
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure. The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
UN Human Rights? You do realize that they consider mass murderers to be qualified to sit on human rights committees, don’t you?
It’s not the least bit surprising that the Pentagon, no matter who’s in charge of it, is going to do its best to ensure favorable coverage of the actions of the U.S. military. It’s not right, but I’m willing to wager that the U.S. has been doing this since, well, 1776.
What’s amazing is that despite these efforts, the ABM has done a damned good job of deligitimizing the efforts of the military in just about every wartime action from Vietnam to, uh, well. To the end of the Bush administration. Oh, and they liked Clinton’s attacks on Bosnia. Those got favorable coverage.
What I want to know is, where are the anti-war protests? Where’s the opposition to our troops being in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did it all just become a legitimate fight when Obama took office? Where’s the negative press coverage of Iraq?
Oh, and that one soldier they quoted at the end of the Stars and Stripes article needs to have “Drama Queen” added to his MOS.
As my coprophagic friend Jackie would say, “This is the worst blog I’ve ever read. And grow up.”