US Military Explored Hiring Bloggers As Propagandists

Zeinfeld writes "Wired reports that one time Clipper Chip supporter Dorothy Denning wrote a report on using blogs for information warfare in 2006 (a report available from cryptome). Amongst the proposals were hiring bloggers directly as propaganda agents and using military media resources to 'make' a blogger posting favorable material. Notably, and most unfortunately absent from the report, is the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media." Is meme warfare just another battleground, or is this dirty pool?

Comments

If Anti-Military Orgs Use Bloggers

[aquatone282]

. . . to place their propaganda on the internet (ahem, Huffington Post, DailyKos, etc, ad nauseum), then why can't the military use bloggers to post its point of view?

Seems like another double-standard to me.

But they have killed Reporters

[MrSteveSD]

It's when they actually start talking about killing reporters to silence dissent [wikipedia.org] that they REALLY get nasty.

During the Kosovo crisis Serbian State TV (equivalent to the BBC) was showing the effects of NATO bombing on civilians. To stop this NATO bombed the Serbian State TV station killing 15 civilians. NATO justified this by saying that the station was a tool of propaganda. By this rational, if the US/UK go to war with Iran, the BBC and many American news outlets will be viable targets. General Wesley Clark was confronted with this war crime during a conference and he seemed very sheepish about it and resorted to saying that his orders had come from the top.

Re:Cool

[Zeinfeld]

Point of information here, when I submitted the story I did not use the term 'propaganda'. Zonk seems to think it makes for a snappier title but it is also wrong. The issue here is not that the GOP is peddling propaganda, its using public money and in particular using the military to do this that is the problem.

Politicizing the military is a real problem in a democratic society. During the 1930s through 70s a whole succession of army generals and colonels decided that they could do a better job than the democratic governments of their countries. Thats how Hitler tried to come to power the first time (the beer hall putsch) and how Franco came to power.

The people who complain about the 'liberal media' seem to believe that anything that does not toe the GOP party line as Hanity, Limbaugh etc. do must be biased.

The establishment media in the US is all biased towards the right. Every Sunday the network news shows feature talk show guest lists where Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one. And when a Democrat does appear, Lieberman is far more likely to appear than Ted Kennedy. Not one of the panels reviewing the first five years of Bush's war in Iraq had a commentator who had been publicly opposed to the war at the start. That is a pretty clear pro-GOP bias. One would expect that a Kos or a Josh Marshall would have earned a slot or Juan Cole who actually can claim to be an expert on the politics of the region. Instead we saw the same myopic pundits who were dead wrong at the start of the war and have learned nothing since.

You can be pretty certain that something similar will happen when they have panels discussing the sub-prime meltdown. Krugman, Atrios have been predicting that it would occur for years now.