Pentagon Manipulating TV Analysts

gollum123 notes an extensive article from the NYTimes on the evidence that the military, since the time of the buildup to the Iraq war, has been manipulating the military analysts that are ubiquitous on TV and radio news programs, in a protracted campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's war efforts. "Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity of military analysts on the major networks, is a Pentagon information apparatus... The effort... 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. Several dozen of the military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members, or consultants. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks. ...[M]embers 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."

Comments

They're just emulating the Drive By Media

[Anonymous Coward]

Soldiers coming back from Iraq are constantly complaining that the war that is being described by the media is not the same one they're experiencing in the field.

The problem is the lack of a free speech culture

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's all very well to have free speech written into the constitution, but it's another to have a culture of free speech. Ultimately, it's the culture that is more important. American teenagers grow up thinking that free speech means freedom for individuals to put the word 'fuck' on their T-shirts with no conception that it is one of the ways we keep tyrannies in check and enable the free flow of ideas that leads to the betterment of society. It's easy to get sidelined by trivial free speech issues like nipples at the superbowl and forget that the media should be one of the channels by which we find out if we are heading for tyranny.

Consider Britain during the Thatcher era. Britain lacks strong constitutional free speech protections and so the government imposed a ban on broadcasting the speech of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (of whom I am no supporter BTW). But the media had a culture of free speech regardless of the law and found ways to work around it, eg. by dubbing video of Adams. A strong culture will trump laws. Unfortunately, Americans are sitting on their laurels and taking their free speech for granted. It's not good enough to be written into law if Americans don't work at it.