Propaganda

The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

This Sunday's stunning, front-page New York Times revelations of the Pentagon military analyst program have been met with a wall of silence and cover-up on network television news. America's TV networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and FOX -- are where most Americans get most of their news, and they are the main culprits in allowing Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clarke to turn them into the primary propaganda tool for selling the Iraq war to the public.

PBS NewsHour covered this issue in a televised debate April 24 pitting me against Robert Zelnick, former ABC Pentagon correspondent and now chair of the Boston University journalism department. (Zelnick is also affiliated with the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank.) No one from the Pentagon would agree to appear on the PBS show, nor would anyone appear from any of the guilty TV networks.

My debate with Zelnick is now on YouTube, where you can watch it yourself. The NewsHour report on the Pentagon pundits that preceded our debate is also online, and if you have a slow internet connection (or if you find my face and voice too irritating to tolerate), you can also read the online transcript.

David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration's most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have long criticized the widespread TV network practice of hiring former military officials to serve as analysts, but even in our most cynical moments we did not anticipate how bad it was. Barstow has painstakingly documented how these analysts, most of them military industry consultants and lobbyists, were directly chosen, managed, coordinated and given their talking points by the Pentagon's ministers of propaganda.