Reportr Exposes Military’s Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign

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EXCLUSIVE…Pentagon Pundits: New York Times Reporter David Barstow Wins Pulitzer Prize for Exposing Military’s Pro-War Propaganda Media Campaign

In his first national broadcast interview, New York Times reporter David Barstow speaks about his 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the Pentagon propaganda campaign to recruit more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as military analysts ahead of and during the Iraq war. This week, the Pentagon inspector general’s office admitted its exoneration of the program was flawed and withdrew it.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin by talking about this report that has been retracted by the Pentagon. Explain exactly what it said and where it was and how it was retracted.


DAVID BARSTOW: Well, on January 14th of this year, as you pointed out, the inspector general came out with this long-awaited report that was—essentially, a group of members of Congress, after the stories ran, asked for the inspector general to take a look at this program that I wrote about and look at a couple of key questions. One was, did it violate longstanding laws that we have that forbid the Pentagon from targeting the American public with propaganda? And another was this question of whether or not the special access that was granted to the military analysts who participated in this program, whether that access was used to help them in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.


And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, General Barry McCaffrey, who’s probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors. Well, I had written 5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors, either as someone who sat on the boards of publicly traded companies, as a consultant to many defense contractors, and as an advisor to a private equity firm in New York that invests heavily in the biggest defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, it became pretty clear that there was something wrong with this report.


What we’ve learned in the last few days is that a couple of different independent inquiries happened inside the inspector general’s office in the wake of that report, in the wake of concerns that were being raised by members of Congress and others that there was something wrong with this report. And as they dug deeper and deeper and deeper into it, they just found more and more factual errors, flaws in methodology. We learned that the people who did the initial report didn’t even bother, apparently, to read all of the emails that we had pried loose over the course of a two-year Freedom of Information Act battle with the Defense Department. So, ultimately, they came very reluctantly to the conclusion that the only thing that they could do was simply to rescind the entire report.


We’ll see where it goes from here. There are some members of Congress who are saying, “We need to know more about why that inspector general’s report went so far off the track.”

Nothing surprises me as to the lengths this country will go to distort media infomation broadcasted to our citizens. Simply amazing that many STILL buy this propaganda.

Peace

Commy

what's more, its not just the pentagon saying, "yeah we should plant some military officials to sell this war"

for that to even be possible the media has to be obedient. They have to let these fools on the air, which they all did, no questions asked.

Its a system. government/corporate cooperation.



Nothin proper about your propaganda.

Cosmo

The Broadcast media also played a big role in selling the war...
In 1991, Cable News came into its own. CNN was pretty much 'Just another 24 hour news station' that re-cycled the same 23 minutes of the same stories for 24 hours each day.
Then, all of a sudden, John Arnet and Bernard Whatsizface were in a Baghdad Hotel as the 'Mother Of All Battles' begun. They had an exclusive, and everyone in the world was glued to their televisions. The Gulf War made the careers for Wolf Blitzer and the NBC 'Scud Stud' who would probably ended up as daytime Game Show hosts.
In 2002/2003, every station had the graphic that flashed, "Showdown With Saddam"... or "Line in The Sand"... or "Countdown To The Showdown"... along with the stars and stripes and the scary war music. They wanted war so they could broadcast it from the field. They were drooling over the chance to get embedded with actual combat batallions and have a front row seat to the 'Shock And Awe' display that would make the 1991 military briefing videos look like a game of 'Pong' on the beginners mode.
We were being sold a bill of goods... or more like, a bag of shit. The Pentagon isn't made up of a bunch of idiots. They saw how easy this would be and took advantage of all those shitheads looking forward to huge ratings windfalls.
It was all just too easy.