NYT: DOD Strategic Communications
Today’s New York Times features two items concerning the Department of Defense and strategic communications / outreach. David Barstow’s Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand makes the claim that a “Pentagon information apparatus” has used a group of retired military officers in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
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…
The article continues.
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.
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said…
Much more here and at NYT’s multimedia piece – How the Pentagon Spread Its Message – chapters include The General’s Revolt, A Private Meeting and Deployed on the Air. Also included are the primary source documents used by the NYT.
Michael Goldfarb, Weekly Standard, comments.
The piece goes on for some ten pages, with one damning revelation after the next.The Pentagon distributes talking points, provides special access to retired generals, and even arranged a meeting for them with the Secretary of Defense. You’ll also be very surprised to learn that many retired generals have business interests in the defense industry.
The paper offers no evidence that any of these men were using their influence to directly further a personal interest (unless one counts “networking”), and it offers no evidence of coercion on the part of the administration. So the charge is a lack of transparency, and it rests on the assumption that Americans are too stupid to surmise the likely ideological and institutional biases of a former general officer in the United States military.
For my money, concerning understanding the complexities and trends in strategic communications / outreach and public diplomacy, I do my research (sanity check) at MountainRunner, an excellent resource by Matt Armstrong.
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SWJ Editors’ Links
Stop the Presses! – Contentions
The NYT’s Method and the Commentariat – Democracy Project
NYTimes Exclusive: Generals Know People at Pentagon – Weekly Standard Blog
Attacking the Military Analysts – PrairiePundit
