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The New York Times
Opinion
The Tarnished Brass
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com from the Web, April 26, 2008
As it prepared to invade Iraq five
years ago, the Bush administration called up retired military officers to help
sell the war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his propaganda team
courted as many as 75 retired military officers who could best market the
Pentagon line, particularly on television. As detailed in The Times on
Sunday, many of these officers used their access to Pentagon bigwigs to promote
their private businesses.
The deal was simple: Offer good news on Iraq, even when the news is bad.
All administrations try to spin, or even manipulate, the news media, but this
White House has taken that to a new low. The Bush administration has hired
actors to pose as journalists. It has produced mock news bulletins to
promote its view of the Iraq war. At least one conservative commentator
was paid $240,000 to go on television to promote President Bush’s education
policies. Now, based on thousands of e-mail messages and other documents,
The Times’s David Barstow has outlined how the Pentagon used a “Trojan horse” of
former military officers to parrot falsely positive messages.
These willful distortions only undermine any remaining shreds of the
administration’s credibility and demean the former officers. They also
failed to fool the public.
Mr. Bush’s national security team — and many Pentagon officers — continues to
labor under the tragic delusion that negative coverage, rather than the bad news
itself, undermined public support for the war in Vietnam. So the
propaganda experts created the instant commentariat of decorated retired
generals and admirals who could seem to be strong and independent voices.
Too many were not independent at all. One example: a retired Marine
colonel and Fox News analyst asked his Pentagon contact to “please let me know
if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to
downplay.”
Worse, some of the analysts had business relationships with the Pentagon that
they wanted to preserve. One Pentagon aide acknowledged that the business
relationship was part of the formula. Some former military officers were
skeptical of the war in private and in public, but doubts were punished by the
Pentagon. One former officer reported being “fired from the analysts
group” after he said on Fox News that America was “not on a good glide path
right now” in Iraq.
News organizations bear the ultimate responsibility for using experts. The
Times has a system for vetting an outsider’s credentials and conflicts.
But news organizations should give viewers and readers as much information as
possible about anyone offering expert opinion.
As for the government’s role, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, is
calling for an investigation of the propaganda purveyors, especially those with
business ties to the Pentagon. That is a start. Candidates for
president should also declare their views about how to market policies to the
public and the news media. Hint: the Rumsfeld propaganda show is not
the way.
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