Glenn Greenwald
 
Tuesday April 22, 2008 08:55 EDT
Media's refusal to address the NYT's "military analyst" story continues

(updated below)

I was hoping to write about the fallout from the NYT's Saturday story regarding the media's use of Pentagon-controlled "independent" military analysts, but there hasn't really been any fallout at all. Despite being accused by the NYT in a very lengthy, well-documented expose of misleadingly feeding government propaganda to their viewers and readers, virtually all media outlets continue their steadfast refusal to address or even acknowledge the story. How can "news" organizations refuse to address -- just completely ignore -- accusations which fundamentally indict their behavior as "journalists"?

As I noted on Sunday, the most striking part of the roughly-7000-word article was that several of the most guilty news outlets -- CBS, NBC and Fox -- just outright refused to answer the NYT's questions about their use of military analysts, what they knew about their analysts' dealings with the Pentagon and the defense industry, and what procedures they use (then and now) to ensure that they don't broadcast government propaganda disguised as independent analysis. Identically, other news organizations not explicitly mentioned by the NYT article but which used some of the tainted sources (such as The Washington Post) have similarly failed to address their role in disseminating this Pentagon-controlled propaganda.

Media organizations simply ignore -- collectively blackout -- any stories that expose major corruption in their news reporting, as evidenced by the fact that no major network or cable news programs have ever meaningfully examined the fundamental failures of the media in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. As Bill Moyers noted at the beginning of his truly superb documentary on the media-government collaboration concerning the invasion: "The story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television." Thus, one of the most significant political stories of this generation -- what Moyers described as "our press largely surrender[ing] its independence and skepticism to join with our Government in marching to war" -- has simply been rendered invisible by our largest media outlets. That scandal just does not exist, particularly on television.

And now we have what is by all metrics a huge new story regarding more fundamental media failures (at best), and they collectively invoke the Kremlin-like methods of Dick Cheney -- they refuse to comment, refuse to reveal even the most basic facts about what they did, and do everything possible to hide behind the wall of secrecy they maintain. They don't even feel the slightest bit obligated to say whether they have any procedures to prevent manipulation of this sort in the future. And those classic information-suppressing tactics are all being invoked by news organizations -- which claim to be devoted to disclosing, not concealing, scandals, corruption and facts about how our political institutions function.

One of the only media organs to respond to Barstow's inquiries was CNN, which used several of the suspect, Pentagon-connected military analysts in their war coverage. To its credit, CNN acknowledged that, at least in the case of one analyst it used (Gen. Marks), it knew that he was working for a defense contractor at the time but "did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions (they) should have." In general, though, CNN denied being aware of the various conflicts which the NYT article detailed.

But as I noted the other day, questions about the independence of these military analysts were obvious and, well prior to the Barstow article, were raised in several venues, including the NYT itself. It just wasn't the case that these media organizations, until last Saturday, were unaware of the serious problems with using these sources. These outlets, including CNN, were well aware of these problems and simply decided that they were irrelevant. Indeed, in CNN's case, contrary to the gist of its denials to the NYT, it actually seemed to be a source of pride that the military analysts they were using were explicitly approved of by the Bush administration.

Long-time journalist Norman Solomon produced a 2007 documentary detailing the historical use of propaganda by the government and media to generate American support for all of the numerous wars we've started over the years. Entitled War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, the documentary was narrated by Sean Penn, and included this exchange on the problematic aspects of using retired generals as war commentators (.pdf; h/t Scott Horton via email):

That's the head of CNN admitting -- proudly -- that the military analysts they used to tell their viewers about the war were ones pre-approved, enthusiastically, by the Pentagon -- approval which Jordan said was "important." CNN may not have known about the specific business interests these analysts had -- mostly because they did not want to know and thus didn't ask -- but they plainly knew, by their own admission, that the war analysts they were using were ones that the Pentagon told them to use. It's hard to imagine a more vivid illustration of how dependent on the Government our news organizations are than a confession by CNN's chief that they were eager to have their on-air war commentators approved by top Bush officials.

One of the very few mentions in the establishment press of any of these matters was at the very end of Howard Kurtz's CNN media show on Sunday, where Kurtz largely (though not entirely) downplayed its significance, assigned blame to the individual military sources rather than to his media bosses, and asserted that these matters were unknown to media outlets at the time (Kurtz, to his credit, also summarized the key aspects of the story in his Post column yesterday). On his television show, Kurtz said:

    In a lengthy investigation published this morning, "The New York Times" reveals that military analysts, that parade of retired generals and colonels you see on the screen, have been working in far greater cooperation with the Pentagon than anyone knew. They met repeatedly with Donald Rumsfeld, received dozens of briefings, were flown to places like Guantanamo Bay, and often reflected the military's viewpoint in their commentary.

All of that was anything but unknown. As I noted on Saturday, the NYT itself noted back in 2003 that these military analysts almost invariably spewed the pro-Bush line in their commentary and also that "some receive occasional briefings from the Pentagon." Moreover, Kurtz's then-boss at CNN, Eason Jordan, admitted that it wasn't only the Generals consulting with the Pentagon about what to tell viewers, but CNN itself was also essentially doing that by only putting on the air military analysts who had the Pentagon's explicit approval.

Whatever one's views are on the media's proper role and its obligations to its viewers and readers (if any), this is a major story by any measure. These media outlets were either duped by the Bush administration and their own sources into feeding government war propaganda to their audience, or were knowingly complicit in doing that.

The fact that they simply refuse to account for their behavior -- hiding behind "no comment" walls of obfuscation or issuing cursory, empty statements -- demonstrates rather conclusively that they are in the business of doing everything except revealing relevant news to their audience. It's really the height of hubris, and unmistakable proof of their core corruption, that not even a front-page, lengthy NYT expose can cause them to address their central, ongoing role in uncritically disseminating government propaganda about the weightiest of matters.

UPDATE: One of the many long-time superb commenters at this blog -- DCLaw1 -- has just begun his own blog, and his maiden post concerns the NYT story and what it reflects about the true character -- and inherent limitations -- of our modern establishment journalist class. If his blog is even half as insightful and well-written as his comments have been, the blog will be well worth adding to your list of daily reads.

At The Nation, Ari Melber also writes about the NYT story and highlights the unstated converse to the NYT's revelation that all of our leading media outlets relied upon pro-government military analysts: "So what does it take to disqualify a former general from on-air analysis? Criticizing President Bush." As Melber suggests, at exactly the same time that these outlets were shoving pro-government and pro-war propaganda sources down the throats of their audience, they were cleansing themselves of anti-war viewpoints or other sources deeemed too critical of the Government.

-- Glenn Greenwald
 
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/22/analysts/index.html
 

Wednesday April 23, 2008 13:04 EDT
Interview with Aaron Brown on NYT "military analyst" story

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Yesterday, Democracy Now broadcast an excellent report on what ought to be (but isn't) the ongoing scandal revealed by the NYT concerning the establishment media's use of "military analysts" in the run-up to the Iraq war and after. The whole segment is worth watching or reading (transcript and video are here) -- retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, for instance, opined that "when you put together the campaign that [Pentagon Communications official] Torie Clarke did with these three elements, you're very close to a violation of the law" which prohibits the use of military propaganda -- but I want to highlight one vital fact conclusively demonstrated by this segment.

The severe problems created by using retired U.S. Generals as military analysts to comment on American wars have long been brought to the attention of the establishment media -- long before Sunday's NYT story. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman had a rather contentious interview all the way back in 1999 with then-CNN anchor and vice-president Frank Sesno regarding the use of these retired Generals to comment (in an almost uniformly pro-Government/pro-war manner) on the Clinton administration's bombing campaign in Serbia (that interview transcript is included in the above link). Even back then, Goodman repeatedly asked CNN's executive why anti-war voices were excluded almost entirely from CNN's coverage of that war and whether CNN was concerned about the obvious conflicts and propaganda risks in "putting retired military generals on the payroll as military analysts."

Identically, in April, 2003, a couple of weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Democracy Now interviewed then-CNN anchor Aaron Brown about CNN's reliance on retired Generals as military analysts, the virtually complete exclusion of anti-war voices from its coverage, and the various problems which such behavior engenders. Senso and Brown were equally dismissive of these concerns, contending that the "retired Generals" were merely speaking about apolitical tactical questions rather than engaging in political advocacy about U.S. policy. Both were also completely dismissive of the more general concerns that were raised -- in 2003, Brown said: "I think the generals question, respectfully, is a colossal red herring" and said that, once a war began, there was no reason to hear from anti-war advocates:

    JEREMY SCAHILL: Aaron, will you consider hiring a paid antiwar analyst for NewsNight?

    AARON BROWN: I honestly don't think it's a particularly relevant question. I mean, it's not—it's—we're in a war. There's going to be times after the war when we're going to have to talk about how that—how the occupation is being run and whether it's being run appropriately by the right people, and in a fair and smart way, and what the implications are of an American occupation of an important Arab capital. And at that point, by and large, the generals go away because there's no war to cover. Or there's a different war to cover, a different kind of war to cover. And we'll look for a range of people to talk about those issues.

    AMY GOODMAN: But right now?

    AARON BROWN: But again, no, because I think it's a red herring issue.

    AMY GOODMAN: To have an antiwar analyst onboard, paid to be at your beck and call, like the generals?

    AARON BROWN: I think -- yes. As my daughter would say, I'm not sure what part of that answer was confusing. But yes, I don't think that's the question, and I don't think it's how we use the generals at all, period. I mean, I don't know how many times we're going to go over the same thing. I just don't think we use the generals to argue the war. We use the generals to explain what is happening on the ground and why. That's an important thing to do, and that's the role they play.

I interviewed Brown this morning about all of these matters (link below). Before doing so, I spent several hours reading through transcripts of Aaron Brown's CNN shows on Iraq from January through May, 2003. The distinction he drew to defend CNN's heavy reliance on pro-government military analysts -- that they were there only to instruct viewers on tactical and military questions, not to engage in political advocacy -- is completely artificial. Of course the retired Generals continuously said things to promote support for the war.

In fact, at least two of the retired Generals the NYT article featured -- Gen. David Grange and Gen. Donald W. Shepperd -- were featured on several of Brown's shows. As was true for most of those "military analysts," they frequently insinuated all sorts of political (and invariably pro-war) "analysis" into their commentary. As but one example, Gen. Grange was a guest on Brown's CNN show on January 3, 2003 and began his appearance by singing the praises of the imminent invasion:

    But I believe that to go ahead and remove that regime, to then temporarily occupy Iraq, to change it from a fascist regime to some type of democratic governance will then give us a geopolitical advantage in that region to change the status quo, which will affect Iran, it will affect the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, it will affect the Hezbollah terrorist organizations.

    And then, with the resources from Iraq, the oil, for example, will cause it to be able to transition very quickly and actually cause a big change, I think, in the Middle East.

That was pro-Government political advocacy in its purest form. It was virtually never rebutted by any guests and it was routinely spouted by these allegedly "independent" military analysts. The fact that, even now, Brown and other CNN officials depict these retired Generals as apolitical "military analysts" itself demonstrates how pernicious this practice was -- and continues to be.

Moreover, just on a common sense plane, the distinction between "tactical commentary" and "political advocacy" is totally artificial, since people who supported the war would, almost by definition, view the tactical challenges and risks as being far less significant than war opponents. If CNN's only interest -- as Brown claimed -- was to provide its viewers with expert views on military tactics, then why not hear from military experts who opposed the war and/or who were from countries where was opposition was common? It's just self-evident that flooding viewers with Pentagon-connected, pro-war "military analysts" is going to skew the coverage, even with regard to supposedly apolitical tactical commentary.

In fairness to Brown, his show was mildly more balanced and nuanced in its war commentary than virtually any other show on CNN or anywhere else in the establishment media. Still, the "war experts" whom he paraded across the screen with great regularity were almost uniformly pro-war -- Ken Pollack and Robert Kagan were frequent guests, for instance, and almost always opined unchallenged by any anti-war guest.

This is the central point I've been trying to emphasize since I first read the NYT expose. Many of the details that article revealed were new, but the conceptual journalistic problems of relying heavily on U.S. military sources -- the principal conceptual problem being that these media outlets were uncritically amplifying government claims, i.e., acting as propaganda arms for the Government -- were well known and they simply ignored them. Promoting the pro-war view was their principal mission, and there is simply no way to deny that when one goes back and looks at their coverage choices.

Brown, who now teaches journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, was receptive to some of these criticisms -- far more so than the standard establishment journalist -- and was defensive about many others. But I thought his responses were nonetheless interesting, instructive, and occasionally thoughtful. The interview I conducted with him this morning about these matters can be heard here.
 
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/23/brown/index.html
 

The Perilous Punditocracy
by Glenn Greenwald

04.23.2008

A look at the absurd pronouncements of the political class from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. Why do pundits get to be wrong all the time? From the May/June 2008 issue of The National Interest.

THE RECORD of the American pundit class with regard to the 2008 presidential election can be summarized in one word: wrong. For the last twelve months, political journalists in unison have created and then imposed countless predictive narratives onto their “news” coverage of the campaign, narratives which have repeatedly turned out to be completely inaccurate. Yet they never learn their lesson, are never held accountable and virtually never acknowledge their errors. Political punditry is the ultimate accountability-free profession.

It is not merely opinionists who have spun these predictive tales, but so-called straight reporters as well. Indeed, dominating the media’s news coverage of presidential campaigns are claims about what is likely to happen in the future. Rather than focusing on the candidates’ records, the validity of their positions or the truth of their factual assertions, political election coverage instead is obsessed primarily with the question of who is likely to win and lose. Like most fortune-tellers, reporters’ fixation on predictive narratives has left a virtually unbroken string of humiliating errors.

Throughout all of 2007, without a single vote having been cast, two themes dominated the media’s coverage of the race. First, Hillary Clinton’s nomination was essentially inevitable; her lead in the polls was insurmountable, and her organizational strength rendered her invulnerable to any challenges. Second, John McCain’s candidacy was over, killed by campaign mismanagement, conservative anger over his immigration stance, independent resentment over his support for the “surge,” a lack of funds and Rudy Giuliani’s bulging popular lead.

Yet suddenly, by the end of January 2008, after just a few weeks of voting in a handful of small states, Barack Obama and John McCain were declared to be the all-but-certain nominees. Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were but failed afterthoughts. Within a matter of a few short weeks, the yearlong pundit script was instantaneously rewritten—just scrapped—with barely any acknowledgment that it ever existed.

Coddled, well-compensated national journalists view elections as a fun game—something about which they gossip with one another, constantly reinforcing their own groupthink biases—but not as anything that truly matters. By stark contrast, the average voter, faced with increasing economic insecurity and concerns over a whole variety of pressing problems, actually believes that important matters are at stake, that the outcome of elections can profoundly affect their futures and their families. It is little wonder that reporters are so woefully inept at predicting the voting behavior of people with whom they have virtually nothing in common.

The vast gap between the prevailing journalistic narrative and reality has extended to virtually every predictive story line, large and small, and encompasses everything from foreign- and domestic-policy debates to national elections. A favorite tactic with virtually every pundit is to take whatever their own personal opinion happens to be, preface it with the phrase “Americans believe” or “most Americans think,” and then appoint themselves Spokesman for the American People. Even worse, while they cast themselves as the mouthpiece of the Silent, Noble American Majority, it just so happens that “Americans” now overwhelmingly reject their belief system.

Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is an especially prominent pundit who favors this tactic. In one such moment where he channeled the voice of the “American People,” Brooks proclaimed that their greatest hope was to continue to rule the world—and particularly the Middle East—with the United States’ mighty, dominant military power:

    Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world. . . .
    This is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances. This is not a country renouncing the threat of force. This is not a country looking to come home again. The Iraq syndrome is over before it even had a chance to begin.

So, according to Brooks, this is just “another chapter in [America’s] long expansionist story.” And think twice if you presume the Iraq experience is going to prevent a U.S. attack on Iran. Americans still crave the “dominant role in the world.”

But let us not be fooled into thinking he really speaks for the American people. Oddly enough, there’s a way to find out. It’s called “polling data.” I can happily point out that we hear nary a whisper of these facts in Brooks’s piece and his oft-repeated claims about what Americans think are purely false. Neoconservative fantasies aside, military adventures are increasingly repudiated by Americans. A Pew poll of early February 2006 states:

    When President Bush delivered a strong warning against isolationism in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he was speaking to a recent and dramatic turn in public opinion. A recent Pew Research survey found a decided revival of isolationist sentiment among the public, to levels not seen since [the] post-Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s. Moreover, one of the main pillars of Bush’s argument in favor of global engagement—the need to promote democracy around the world—has not struck a chord with the public. Support for that objective has been consistently tepid, even among members of Bush’s own party.

Particularly, the idea that the United States should topple foreign governments and “spread freedom” is pretty much as marginalized as you can get:

    Of thirteen foreign policy priorities tested in Pew’s October [2005] survey, “promoting democracy in other nations” came in dead last. . . . And in contrast with public opinion on most foreign policy questions these days, there is no partisan divide—Republicans and Democrats agree. . . .

We see an offshoot of this phenomenon with the venerable Howard Kurtz of CNN/Washington Post, who has a tendency to recycle stories from the right-wing blogosphere, passing them off as what America needs to know. With what seems to be a little jig, he recites the emerging Beltway wisdom that—gasp!—we just might be winning in Iraq. And that just might hurt the Democrats in the election.

But hope against Howard-Kurtz hope, people just don’t seem to be changing their minds. Yet again, polling data released a couple of days after Kurtz’s article of November 6, 2007, this time from CNN, showed that overall, 68 percent of Americans were opposed to the war in Iraq—a new record. And again devastating to Brooks’s point, 63 percent opposed air strikes on Iran. That number jumped up to 73 when we talk about adding ground troops to a military adventure.

But Brooks, Kurtz, the Politico’s Jim VandeHei, David Broder and Shailagh Murray at the Washington Post, and others still promise that this is all going to work out. Pundits like these love to pretend that they are free of political opinion and bias and instead masquerade as Spokesmen for the People, attributing to those People the views which the pundits themselves harbor but will not acknowledge. Time and again, this self-centered, self-referential method for opining about political matters produces claims and predictions which are dead wrong.

And these relentlessly inaccurate predictions were unending in the weeks prior to the first nationwide vote, the January 3 Iowa caucus; polls almost unanimously showed an increasingly large lead for the former GOP governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee. For months, the press had ignored Huckabee as an irrelevant also-ran, and the surge of support reflected by these polls—coming from the state’s large evangelical voter block—was predicted by virtually none of the pundits.

As Huckabee’s increased polling strength brought him more media attention, he committed a series of what journalists refer to as “gaffes”—mistakes that, in the eyes of the pundit class, reflected what a terribly unsophisticated candidate he was, a mere “rookie” unfamiliar with the time-tested Beltway rules for how a candidate should behave. Each time Huckabee violated one of their sacred principles, journalists insisted with great certainty that the latest gaffe would harm Hucakabee’s prospects in Iowa. Yet Huckabee’s lead continued to grow as a result of the evangelical voters who were completely indifferent to the petty insider mistakes on which the pundit class was so fixated.

Huckabee’s most scorn-inducing “mistake” occurred during a late-December press conference held just before the Iowa caucus. He announced his campaign had produced a negative ad aimed at his rival, Mitt Romney, but that he, Huckabee, had insisted it not be used. Nonetheless, Huckabee showed the ad to reporters then and there—a move which journalists covering the Iowa race, with virtual unanimity, condemned as a nakedly cynical and unsophisticated ploy to reap the benefits of quashing a negative ad while, at the same time, ensuring its circulation by showing it to reporters at the press conference.

To the oh-so-knowing national press, this process mistake was not merely embarrassing, but would be fatal to Huckabee’s campaign. One after the next—like a flock of birds parroting each other—they pronounced Huckabee’s campaign mortally wounded by this grave error.

“That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion,” intoned Time’s Joe Klein the next day, in an item he entitled “Huckabust.” The Politico’s Mike Allen wrote, “The national political press corps . . . had a harmonic convergence yesterday on a single point: Huckabee lost it at his news conference yesterday.” Allen’s Politico colleague, Jonathan Martin, echoed, “Huckabee has found himself under the unforgiving glare of the front-runner’s spotlight, and his hopes to win here have now become severely threatened by it.”

A mere two days after Huckabee’s Iowa media obituary was written, the caucus was held. Huckabee, with 34 percent of the vote, crushed all of his opponents, including the far-better-funded and -organized former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and the yearlong front-runner, Rudy Giuliani. What national journalists were so certain was such a significant, even fatal, event—Huckabee’s comments about the negative ad—could not have been of any less importance to Iowa voters. The gap between the perceptions of the pundit class and ordinary voters could scarcely be any larger or more self-evident.

Following Iowa, journalists had a new, universally embraced story line: Barack Obama’s Iowa win and large polling lead in the next state, New Hampshire, meant that his nomination had become inevitable, while the prior “inevitable” nominee, Hillary Clinton, was now destined to fail. Four days later, Clinton won New Hampshire, and that script, too, was instantly scrapped. In the wake of the New Hampshire press debacle, the Politico was one of the very few American news outlets to acknowledge just how continuously wrong the media has been, as John Harris and Jim VandeHei published a candid mea culpa documenting the press’s yearlong string of failures.

The Politico duo noted that the loser in New Hampshire was not only Obama but also “us”: “‘Us’ is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently—and so rashly—stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.” Itemizing the countless number of factually false predictive story lines the American press had manufactured throughout the year, they continued:

    If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

The admission of systematic error from Harris and VandeHei is notable because of how rare it is. Reporters virtually never acknowledge just how wrong their predictive claims turn out to be. While the New Hampshire error was too blatant to ignore completely—television and print reporters spent days telling their audience that Obama’s victory was certain only to watch as Clinton won—most ended up dismissively blaming the pollsters for their mistakes, rather than acknowledging, let alone meaningfully discussing, the fundamental flaws in their coverage that have produced this deeply embarrassing record of wrongness.

And so we come back again to the Iraq War and more recent wrongheaded predictions. In their never-ending hope that Americans will begin to support the McCain position on Iraq, the Politico published a blatantly one-sided article, authored by David Paul Kuhn and citing the now-infamous Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution:

    The uptick in public support is a promising sign for Republican candidates who have been bludgeoned over the Bush administration’s war policies. But no candidate stands to gain more than McCain.

But on the very same day, a USA Today/Gallup poll was released, showing—surprise, surprise—that 60 percent of Americans wanted to “set a timetable for removing troops and stick to it regardless of what is going on in Iraq.” And that runs pretty much contrary to the McCain position.

As a general matter, there is no reason whatsoever why reporters—as opposed to pundits—ought to be infusing predictions into their reporting at all. Predicting the future is a completely inappropriate role for political reporters to play, yet it composes virtually the entirety of their election coverage. If one reads Time or the New Republic or the Politico or the Washington Post, one is hard-pressed to find any examples of straight-factual reporting about the remaining candidates, their positions, anything substantive—as opposed to endless, groupthink gossip about tactics and campaigns and winning/losing “horse race” predictions. The distinction between reporters and opinionists—particularly when it comes to campaign reporting—has been eroded almost completely, so that reporters now act as though they are commentators whose principal role it is, clairvoyantlike, to declare who will likely win and lose.

Beyond the deviation by journalists from the basic parameters of fact reporting, it has become increasingly clear that the traveling press corps following the various candidates lives in an insular, segregated, profoundly out-of-touch bubble. The way they think about campaigns and elections could not be any further removed from how elections are perceived by the storied “average voter,” on whose behalf the press corps absurdly fantasizes they speak.

For virtually all of 2007—with the first vote still months away—most ordinary voters paid little attention to the presidential campaign. As a result, the front-runner status of Clinton and Giuliani—like that of Joe Lieberman in 2004—was clearly a by-product of nothing more significant than superior name recognition, a fact which the politically obsessed reporters were incapable of recognizing.

While the causes for this humiliating record of wrongness can be reasonably debated, its magnitude cannot be. Virtually every predictive pronouncement from the pundit class over the last year has been demonstrably and factually false. Yet the same pundits continue with the same behavior based on the same methods, never paying any price for their deeply flawed record. Being a pundit means never having to say you are sorry, or even admit that you are wrong. You just move seamlessly to the next story line, ignoring your past record of fundamental mistakes as though it never happened.
 
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=17492
 
In Honor of the Lying Military Analysts for Cable TV
By: John Amato on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 AM - PDT 

Are you as shocked as I am about the NY Times article: “Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand?”

…which tells us that once again the American people are being lied to with the help of our media about all things involving war. War—War—War. OK, I wasn’t shocked at all, but it is a truly shocking story. Do these people have any decency left? There should be an investigation into the use of paid shills on our airwaves who are substituted for investigative journalists—used for the sole purpose of distorting the truth to push the company line.

We constantly discuss on the blogs questions like “what are the greatest threats to our Democracy,” and the more and more I ponder it, the more and more I put my finger on the delivery system known as the media. In honor of yet another travesty perpetrated on the American people by our lying media—I bring you Norman Solomon’s very fine: “War Made Easy.”How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death because he was hip to this problem long before the NY Times took a look.

I asked Norman to write a post for C&L on this issue because he was so far out in front of it. He delivered the above video clip from the movie “War Made Easy” with transcript plus the comment below.

    While it’s a positive step, the big front-page New York Times article on Sunday — “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” — is tardy by several years and now makes a remarkable detour around the active role of the television networks themselves in implementing systemic disinformation efforts for starting and continuing war. As I say in the documentary film War Made Easy, “Nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it.” And that just begins to tell the sordid and bloody tale.

    This kind of stuff is 24/7 wartime wallpaper for cable news. The extent of the war-propaganda problem is such that the Times just scratched the surface. For a look at some grim media cases-in-point and samples from War Made Easy, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org

From the War Made Easy transcript:

    SEAN PENN [narrator]: CNN’s use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts reinforced a decidedly military mindset, even as serious questions remained about the wisdom and necessity of going to war.

    NORMAN SOLOMON: Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting. But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it. You had a top CNN official named Eason Jordan going on the air of his network and boasting that he had visited the Pentagon with a list of possible military commentators, and he asked officials at the Defense Department whether that was a good list of people to hire.

    EASON JORDAN [speaking on CNN]: Oh, I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.

    NORMAN SOLOMON: It wasn’t even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on its own network, “See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.” And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press, and that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the U.S. is involved in a war based on.

Thank you Norman. By the way, is C&L allowed to be critical of these generals? Will I be censured by Congress too?

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/22/in-honor-of-the-lying-military-analysts-for-cable-tv/