Pentagon's Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?

Submitted by John Stauber on

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

News of the Pentagon's online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times "limited information about a military office early in the reporting process."

Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Pentagon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all."

The Pew Excellence in Journalism project has a chart showing that "there was virtually no mainstream media follow up to The Times' expose" with the only national TV coverage being the introduction segment and live debate featuring CMD's John Stauber on the PBS NewsHour.

Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro and three dozen colleagues have sent a letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General calling for an investigation of this "propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public."

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Comments

VCubed replied on

I just searched the military advisors/lobbyists who have been feeding fake stories to the media, paid in full to do it, while they also lobby for domestic and foreign corporations seeking Pentagon contracts, and guess what I found: www.hillaryclinton.com/news/release/view From the Hillary Clinton website: "The Clinton campaign today announded [sic] the addition of 36 new co-chairs to the Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary Committee. Newly endorsing members of the committee include Lt. General Joseph Ballard, Lt. Generl [sic] Robert Gard, Lt. General Don Kerrick Major General Paul Eaton, and Major General Robert Scales. They join more than 1,200 veterans and military reirees [sic] who have joined Senator Clinton's national and state veterans'steering committees. Hillary Clinton made the announcement at an event honoring veterans in Waterloo Iowa, where she was accompanied by Major General Eaton. The above isn't on that link given, it's archived, I guess - like so many unseen Clinton Library records. It's linked to from here: <a href="http://">http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/jacobclark/Cr7W</a>

zetetic replied on

The link to the DOD website provided stating there were over 8,000 documents only has a small page of documents from 2007-2008. Where can the remaining documents be found or did the DOD already take them down? Here is the link in the article that claims to have over 8,000 documents http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

Diane Farsetta replied on

That's the correct link, and that page still has all the documents that the Pentagon has made public. There are some 8,000 pages of documents, not 8,000 separate documents, but it's true that so far they're only from 2007 and 2008.