Propaganda and the Media

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by the McClatchy Newspapers
Propaganda and the Media

by Joseph L. Galloway

Once upon a time, it was widely believed that one of the greatest sins the U.S. government or its temporary political masters could commit was to turn a propaganda machine loose on the American people.

Congress viewed this so seriously that every appropriations bill passed since 1951 has contained language that says no public money “shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States” without the lawmakers’ prior approval.

The Bush administration has been caught violating the propaganda ban before, notably in 2005 in the case of radio host Armstrong Williams, who was paid to endorse President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law.

Particularly abhorrent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), which oversees compliance with the ban, is an agency’s use of “covert propaganda” or “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.”

This is why alarm bells should be ringing all over Washington about The New York Times’ disclosure that then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld encouraged a secret Pentagon program to care for and spoon-feed more than 50 retired senior military officers whom the administration deemed reliable friends who could be counted on “to carry our water” on the television and cable networks.

Feeding the military analysts “key and valuable information” in secret briefings by Pentagon and White House officials, the idea went, would make them the go-to guys for the networks and encourage the networks to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts . . . .”

This 2005 memorandum, addressed to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Larry DiRita, added: “This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter.”

Asked about the case of Col. Bill Cowan, who says he was fired as a military analyst for Fox News and cut off from the briefings for criticizing the war effort, DiRita told Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com: “I don’t know anything. I saw that in the story. I’ve heard other assertions to that effect. It was certainly not the intent.”

In a follow-up e-mail exchange between DiRita and Greenwald, Rumsfeld’s former mouthpiece - now Bank of America’s chief spokesman - elaborated on what he said he didn’t remember: “I simply don’t have any recollection of trying to restrict him (Cowan) or others from exposure to what was going on.”

DiRita added: “There are plenty of examples to the contrary - reaching out to people who specifically disagreed with us. One example I recall is Joe Galloway - a persistent critic and apparently popular with military readers. He came in and met Secretary Rumsfeld and we had other interactions.”

Now that’s a real knee-slapper: Me as a poster boy for how Rumsfeld and DiRita “reached out” to their harshest critics even as they stroked and promoted and schemed to embed the old reliables to wax enthusiastic about a war that was going from bad to worse.

Let the record show that Rumsfelds’ folks reached out to me on these few occasions:

* In early summer of 2003, half a dozen of us were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. The defense secretary seemed to have a poor grasp of the reality on the ground in Iraq and was still declaring that we’d do no nation-building there. He saw no insurgency, only a handful of “dead-enders”.

* In October 2005, DiRita called to invite me to travel with Rumsfeld to the Middle East and Australia. I declined because it conflicted with a long-booked graduation speech I was to give at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz. to a class of new Air Force F-16 fighter pilots that included my nephew. DiRita was stunned that I wouldn’t drop a bunch of fighter pilots to be schmoozed by his boss.

* In November 2005, DiRita invited me to a “one-on-one” lunch with Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. This one I accepted. I arrived to find across the table Rumsfeld, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody; Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp and DiRita. We went at it hammer and tongs for an hour and a half over their conduct of the war and the errors that were costing the lives of American soldiers. As I left, I told Rumsfeld that I’d continue to point out those mistakes every week in my column.

* In April 2006, DiRita sent me an e-mail telling me that my most recent column was “silly”. That column had discussed an expensive war game the Pentagon conducted about a U.S. attack on a thinly disguised country that obviously was Iran.

A retired Marine general, Paul Van Riper, had been the commander of the “enemy” forces, and he used unconventional tactics to destroy the U.S. Navy flotilla in the Persian Gulf, leaving thousands of sailors and Marines dead. At that point, the commanders stopped the war game, reset everything and imposed new rules forbidding Van Riper from employing those tactics.

Van Riper walked out, furious, and requested an investigation. DiRita complained in his e-mail that I was silly to blame Rumsfeld for this and for covering up the investigators’ report. After all, he wrote, Rumsfeld couldn’t be expected to know retired generals several levels below him or to bear responsibility for such matters. His complaint sparked an escalating e-mail war that most reckon DiRita lost. The entire exchange was posted on the Internet and can still be found there.

So much for the Rumsfeld/DiRita outreach to their critics. They were much too busy hand-feeding horse manure to their TV generals, who in turn were feeding the same product to the American public by the cubic yard.

There’s little doubt that this program violated the laws against covert propaganda operations mounted against the American public by their own government. But in this administration, there’s no one left to enforce that law or any of the other laws the Bush operatives have been busy violating.

The real crime is that the scheme worked. The television network bosses swallowed the bait, the hook, the line and the sinker, and they have yet to answer for it.

Joseph L. Galloway, a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers, is the co-author, with Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, of “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” a story of the first large-scale ground battle of the Vietnam War.

© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers

Senate Votes To Revive Ban On Media Cross-Ownership

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by Associated Press
Senate Votes To Revive Ban On Media Cross-Ownership


The Senate voted Thursday night to nullify a Federal Communications Commission rule that allows media companies to own a newspaper and a TV station in the same market.

The unusual “resolution of disapproval,” sponsored by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and 24 other senators, was approved on a voice vote.

Republican FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin has described the agency’s action as a “relatively minor loosening” of media ownership restrictions. The FCC approved the rule on a 3-2 vote in December with both Democrats dissenting.

The FCC decision allows one company to own a newspaper and a broadcast station in the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan areas. The TV station may not be among the top four in the market and, post-transaction, at least eight independent media voices must remain. The rule replaced an outright ban on cross-ownership.

Dorgan said the FCC action opened a “gaping loophole for more mergers of newspapers and television stations across the country.”

Martin has said any exception to the ownership rule would face a “very high hurdle.”

The House also is considering a nullification of the rule, but even if supporters are successful, President Bush would probably reject the measure.

On April 1, Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez wrote Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) saying the administration “strongly opposes any attempt to overturn these rules by legislative means” and that senior Bush advisors would recommend that he veto any bill presented to him.

Gutierrez said the FCC’s order “modernizes outdated media ownership regulations to appropriately take into account the plethora of news and information outlets that exist today.”

The FCC’s cross-ownership decision has been met with opposition on both sides. The newspaper industry has complained that the FCC did not go far enough, while activists who want to keep big media companies from getting bigger said the agency went too far.

Among those affected by the regulations is Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5 in Southern California, as well as both print and broadcast operations in four other major markets.

To allow Tribune to close its deal to go private in December, the FCC granted it a permanent waiver for its combination in Chicago and two-year waivers for operations in Los Angeles, New York, South Florida and Hartford, Conn.

© 2008 Associated Press

Appalling Spread of False Information Requires Stronger Media Accountability

By Mark Weisbrot, AlterNetPosted on March 12, 2008,
Printed on March 14, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/79465/

"A free press is supposed to function as our democracy's immune system against . . . gross errors of fact and understanding," wrote Al Gore in his book, The Assault on Reason. But it doesn't - as Gore explains -- and that is what makes the mass media one of the most important obstacles to social and economic progress in the 21st century.

How the media treats repeated falsehoods is a key issue. For example, when the New York Times reports on the allegation -- spread by his enemies -- that presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim, there is a sentence that follows immediately: "In fact, he is a Christian. . ."
The media didn't do this kind of "immune system" work when it reported on the run-up to the Iraq war. As a result, more than 70 percent of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein was involved in the massacre of September 11. More than 4,000 Americans and over one million Iraqis have been killed in the violence that perhaps could have been averted with better journalism.

A 2008 study by the Center for Public Integrity, "The War Card: Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War," documents 935 false statements by President Bush and seven top officials of his administration. The report notes that "much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq."

The mass media fails us on many issues other than war and peace. Most Americans under 50 think they are never going to see their Social Security benefits. In fact, the probability that they won't get their Social Security benefits is about the same as the chance that there won't be a U.S. government when they retire - pretty close to zero. The media could correct this widespread false belief by merely inserting a few undisputed facts about Social Security when reporting false statements from politicians and interest groups. For example: "Social Security is more financially sound than it has been throughout most of its 71-year history"; or "Social Security's projected shortfall over the next 75 years is less (as a percent of national income) than what was fixed in each of the following decades: 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s."

Millions of Americans are now "under water" on their homes -- that is, they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. The rate of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures is breaking records, and has much further to go. Many of these personal financial tragedies could have been avoided had the media reported on the obvious risks of buying a house while a record bubble in house prices was ballooning. Instead, the number one media source on the housing market was David Lereah, then chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, and author of the book Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It. Reporting on the stock market bubble of the late 90s was even worse.

Of course the media is not monolithic, and the TV media -- the main object of Gore's criticism -- tends to be worse than the print media. And some reporters break with current trends. In 2006 the New York Times used the Center for Economic and Policy Research (where I am Co-Director) as its most cited source on the housing market, and therefore was able to see the housing bubble before it broke. But it is surprising how uniform the major media is on many issues, given that there are competing news organizations. A herd mentality often prevails: journalists know that they will almost never get in trouble for reporting something that is wrong when everyone else is also saying it; but they do take a risk when they report something different, even if it is true.

Here in Washington, when one raises the issue of media responsibility, a common response - from policy analysts, political operatives, and journalists - is that the problem is with the American people, that they are just stupid. Interestingly, however, when one strays a bit from their own area of expertise or concentration, it appears that these professionals also believe a number of falsehoods on important issues -- apparently from having heard these things repeated in the media.

Of course the best counterweight to the media's transgressions is an informed and active citizenry. Part of the reason that the media treats Barack Obama more fairly than it treats Social Security is that Obama has millions of active supporters who would raise hell if the media were to engage in serious abuses of him or his candidacy.

Over the long run, we will need to subject the privately owned mass media to more competition. This will come increasingly from the Internet, but real competition will also require an expanded and better quality public media sector. But until this competition gets a lot bigger, it will be up to the citizenry to hold our highly concentrated media accountable as best we can.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79465/