I'm surprised that nobody from PB posted this huge NYT investigative article here for everyone to read and discuss.

It is too big (12 pages) so I'm not sure if I'll follow my usual procedure and copy/paste the whole thing on here. I like to do that so people can read it even months or years later and not click on a dead link or have to pay extra for an archived copy.

This issue was also reported on PBS' NewsHour program and discussed by talking heads, so I'm sure it got coverage by others too. I find it pretty sad that American media are becoming such drones that they cannot form and articulate multiple opinions and do their own investigative journalism specially in times of great need such as when a foreign war is going bad.

I wonder if this was also the situation during Vietnam War. I'm thinking it is directly the result of media consolidation, with the powers increasingly in the hands of the few large corporates who have their own interests with the adiminstration. It is also perhaps because newsrooms have been thinned out.

Anywhere, here's the link. If someone wants the whole article, I'll just have to copy/paste it on several posts because it won't let me do it all in one post.

Here's the first page...

MESSAGE MACHINE; Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: April 20, 2008
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded ''the gulag of our times'' by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.


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.
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.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

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.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.


http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...nalysts&st=nyt

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

Aggie...aggie...aggie...

Slow internetz in TX?

http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/wor...dden-hand.html

Guess everything isn't bigger and better in the land of big everything.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x-fkSYDtUY

"Censorship is free advertising by the government"--Federico Fellini

"Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?"

Which is illegal.

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Czar of the 26th Ward.

Ah, thanks. I see it got exactly one response! Way to go PB!

Not sure about the Texas/bigger better connection though. It's just me not looking for it after not seeing it on the first page of the Nation, the World, and the Politics boards. I thought it would have been a heated topic of discussion and been one of the top threads on one of those boards.

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

Not if you cite the source right there and also give the link to the article. Well, its kind of grey area, and I'm not sure if anyone is going to come after me or PB because I copy/paste entire articles as I often do. I have seen it done in other news distribution schemes where I get one e-mail from a single source that has collected articles from various sources on a given topic. They provide the link and most of the article.

__________________


Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

well, no use having both threads... i suggest keeping this one and getting the other one over here while keeping its contents. more people visit this forum rather than "world" forum and anyways its more of an American national issue, not a world issue.

__________________


Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

*Look* at how overheated the Politics forum has been in the past several weeks. Maybe no one cared about this. Or it just escaped notice. I saw it, so surely others did.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x-fkSYDtUY

"Censorship is free advertising by the government"--Federico Fellini

"Do you mind if I smoke while you eat?"

yeah, i was thinking the same thing! hehe that's my reason as well about why i didn't pay attention to this one or replied to it until just now. and i've been active on the Politics board more so than any other board too lately, though starting yesterday i'm again going on other boards and posting as you noticed.

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

The operative word is "most" of the article.

But I agree the odds someone is going to sue is small, but keep this in mind ...

The reporters get paid. The money has to come from somewhere. I would rather have to follow a link for the full story so that news source gets ad revenue so they can continue paying their reporters than to worry about archiving.

That's why I always post a link and a relevant section of the article.

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Czar of the 26th Ward.

No, it's not remotely a grey area from a legal perspective. Nobody's going to come after you because it's not worth their effort when it's noncommercial, but it is absolutely, unquestionably copyright infringement to copy substantial portions of an article word-for-word without obtaining permission from the publisher, which usually involves payment of royalties. The fact that you've seen people do it a lot of times doesn't mean it's legal. It just means that the illegal activity is not easily prevented, like speeding.

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"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, 1996