I said a few days ago that the Pentagon Pundits story wasn't going away. It's not. It's not just Ike Skelton in the House that is furious about the deception, there are many angles here. Did various media companies break the law by not engaging in a good faith effort to identify conflicts of interest? Did the Pentagon break the law by authorizing and executing a covert psy-ops mission on the public? What is the right remedy? How can Congress deal with the systemic rot within the big media cartel that allowed and enabled this to happen?
John Kerry is beginning to ask these questions, by sending a letter to the GAO requesting an investigation to clarify what happened and whether it's legal.
Kerry asked just how widespread this practice actually was, who knew about it, how it affected defense contracting deals and whether these military analysts or the DoD were breaking propaganda laws. Media reports have asserted that over 150 military contractors, lobbyists, senior officials, and board members were involved in these operations, many of whom had significant financial interests vested in the Administration's wartime policies.
This is just a very tentative first step. The reality is that we've been the subjects of a propaganda effort for five years, one the Pentgaon acknowledged was wrong by 'officially' suspending it this week after being discovered. This isn't going away, because there are bulldogs on the hill that are going to push on this as long as we give them the support.
I've been working with the anti-war groups for a few months now, and the media black-out is just remarkable. It's not just journalists like Marty Kady and outlets like the Politico that protect the conventional wisdom that keeps this war going, it's a systemic disinformation campaign from government actors aided by a media system joined to them at the hip.
It's not just that the media ignores cogent questions like this one on the defense industry in our political discourse, it is far worse. Below is a clip of John Stauber pointing out that the Pentagon military propaganda campaign, revealed by the New York Times, was patently illegal and designed to send this country to war under false pretenses. What's remarkable about this clip is how Bob Zelnick - now the head of the journalism department at Boston University - defends the use of propagandizing military analysts as common knowledge and irrelevant. Respected scions of journalism like Zelnick (who of course claims a liberal media bias) fail to see anything wrong with pay-to-play analysis, telling us more about modern journalism than any ethics course could.
Glenn Greenwald has two posts on this extremely important story, which has heretofore been blacked out by much of the media. Read both of them ( one and two).
the most striking part of the roughly-7000-word article was that several of the most guilty news outlets -- CBS, NBC and Fox -- just outright refused to answer the NYT's questions about their use of military analysts, what they knew about their analysts' dealings with the Pentagon and the defense industry, and what procedures they use (then and now) to ensure that they don't broadcast government propaganda disguised as independent analysis. Identically, other news organizations not explicitly mentioned by the NYT article but which used some of the tainted sources (such as The Washington Post) have similarly failed to address their role in disseminating this Pentagon-controlled propaganda.
Media organizations simply ignore -- collectively blackout -- any stories that expose major corruption in their news reporting, as evidenced by the fact that no major network or cable news programs have ever meaningfully examined the fundamental failures of the media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
All major elements of our corrupted media-industrial-military complex are involved in this controversy. There's systemic organized lying from official sources designed to promote a militaristic strategy, the parading of military uniforms to promote right-wing ideology, grossly negligent conflicts of interest promoted through our media system, a media cover-up, and most obviously, a massive war and strategic blunder.
Congress is not going to let this one lie down. It is very clear at this point that these conglomerates need to be broken up.
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