Trojan Horse Journalism

Just in case there were any diehard true believers left who think there is still a shred of truth in government/media information campaigns--at least in regard to such important matters as torture and murder and aggressive war on innocent populations-- a valuable primer on Geroge W. Bush's propaganda catapult appears in Sunday's New York Times. Excerpted below, but read the whole thing.

To the public, these men [retired US generals] 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. [emphasis mine -ed]

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

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.

While this is not a fresh category of news to anyone with half a functioning brain, it is finally and irrefutably laid out documented by the NYT.

Yup. Thank goodness we don't live in a society where the government lies, and curtails civil rights, keeps secret torture chambers, violates the Geneva convention and US law, and lines it's pocket spending all our money on weapons, and commits heinous war crimes and... oh, never mind.

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