Left In Lowell

Everyone online is talking about this new NY Times report on the way the Bush administration used thinly veiled bribery to get retired military officers out on the airwaves to support Bush policies. It’s as big a news story as it sounds.

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.

In other words, those who took full advantage of the industrial military complex’s revolving door for outgoing military personnel. People who had every financial reason to support going to war and staying there, as their companies or clients were, and are, raking in millions.

This is the embodiment of what Eisenhower warned about.

[Retired military a]nalysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

The article is pages long, and is something every American should read. Why now? Because the information has finally come to light:

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

Disgusting. Those are your kids, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins…your tax dollars…and your country, your media, which have been used, abused, and cynically manipulated for years.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

The free press won’t suit us, because they might report things that make people unhappy, so we’ll just stop that little nagging inherent right of all Americans dead cold.

It goes on. Read it.

MissLaura at dkos flawlessly tears down another mainstream media perpetrated wall about woman, and blogging. If the storyline don’t fit, just ignore it and use other examples…

Reporters start with an easy premise: The bloggers their readers are most likely to have heard of are men. Markos Moulitsas. Duncan “Atrios” Black. Josh Marshall. The problem is, all too often, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Recently, Megan Carpentier of Glamour magazine’s blog Glamocracy asked Markos why there aren’t as many female political bloggers. He answered:

I disagree with that notion. The Daily Kos executive editor, a blogger, of course, is female. Digby is female. Jane Hamsher is female. There are other prominent women (including seven on Daily Kos) writing in group blogs. [links added]

That answer didn’t fit the premise of Carpentier’s piece, so it wasn’t used. To maintain her premise, Carpentier also sloughed off Arianna Huffington in a sentence — sure, the blogger who’s building a freaking empire, who appears on television the most and whose site was recently written up in the New Yorker is a woman, but…

It’s telling that this writer didn’t bother to quote the founder of one of the most trafficked blog sites ever created. What Markos had to say was counter to the story Carpentier had to tell, so to her it’s useless. Funny, I once thought journalism was supposed to find the story, not make it up and then fit the facts. We have the Bush administration for that. MissLaura goes on:

But who the media chooses to quote is just a little bit relevant to which bloggers are best known. Blog audiences can be earned entirely within the blogosphere, it’s true, through stellar writing that draws links that funnel readers. But appearing on television or being cited in the traditional media can boost your prominence … It’s a truism in the blogosphere that links are currency, but it’s as true that traditional media mentions are currency, albeit of a slightly different sort. Links get you more traffic, but media mentions get you the kind of external validation that leads to still more media mentions.

She quotes at length a Chris Bowers post looking at the disproportional influence his own blog (myDD.com) has, despite several other blogs which have far more traffic (including Jane’s Firedoglake). MissLaura then ironically points out that the media, having perpetrated the promotion and references to these blogs, wonder why the blogosphere is doing to prevent all these women from getting positions of prominence. Right. MissLaura then concludes:

Megan Carpentier wrote a really stupid piece for Glamocracy, and her failure to quote Markos rejecting her premise makes you wonder how many other people she left out because what they said didn’t fit her narrative. But she didn’t pioneer this kind of stupidity. She was rerunning a hackneyed story the traditional media has been telling about blogging for quite some time. There are lots of different stories to write about blogs and gender — never mind “prominent” bloggers, why does it seem that state bloggers are so disproportionately male? How do women and men blogging together at group blogs get treated differently by readers or the traditional media? Is it the case that men started the earlier blogs, and if so, at what rate have women been catching up? Whose blogging is more likely to lead to paid work as an institutional or campaign blogger, as a journalist, as a consultant? Do meat-world credentials play a different role in how male and female bloggers are received? These questions don’t get asked, going unmentioned to leave room for the fortieth retread of “why are the three bloggers the laziest journalist can think of all men?”

Chalk up one more instance of why the MSM will continue to be mocked and criticized by bloggers everywhere.