A LITTLE-noticed wire story in The Virginian-Pilot last month revealed a staggering breach of public trust by Pentagon leaders, who were seeking to achieve "information dominance" through a program that sabotaged traditional journalism.
"Pentagon's Invisible Hand Woos Analysts" ran April 20 on page 7 of the news section. It disclosed how retired senior military officers became what retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni called "cheerleaders for the Pentagon" in their roles as analysts on television news programs.
Viewers, however, were largely unaware that many of these presumably "independent" voices also had huge financial stakes in and ideological commitments to the policies they were evaluating.
In its taxpayer-financed propaganda campaign, the Pentagon quietly courted about 75 flag officers with an expectation that they'd sell the Iraq war to the public in their on-air comments. These officials met regularly with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had access to classified intelligence, and were flown on Pentagon-financed trips to Iraq and Guantanamo. Because their vested interests as consultants, board members, lobbyists or employees in the defense industry were never disclosed by NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox, viewers had no way to fully judge their often up-beat assessments of the war. The statements often contradicted reports from Baghdad-based journalists.
In short, Americans were being hoodwinked by the government, while the media neglected to appropriately vet their analysts.
Print journalism was also caught in the Pentagon blitz, although to a lesser extent. The Times ran op-ed pieces authored by at least nine of the analysts. A Lexis-Nexis search of Pilot archives indicates that none of the retired military men in question appears to have written op-ed articles for us. A few names show up in stories, many of which were written while they were still on active duty.
The issue has special resonance in Hampton Roads, where so many people are part of the military or indirectly linked to the service, and where numerous retired senior officers live. We deserve to know why directors of news programs appear to have been largely unaware that talking heads were being scripted by the Pentagon and had business ties that could have tainted their judgments.
The Pilot article was an abbreviated version of one that appeared in The New York Times. In it, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Barstow detailed the six-year-old campaign to transform dozens of retired officers who appeared on television or wrote op-ed pieces into "message force multipliers." That's Pentagon-speak for getting a chorus of these generals, colonels and majors to sing in unison to vast audiences. And they did so thousands of times.
Even Dale Eisman, The Pilot's veteran Washington-based military correspondent, confessed a measure of surprise.
The reach of the program, as revealed in hundreds of pages of memos, e-mail messages and other documents that Barstow acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Eisman said, gave him pause. "It was interesting to see how assiduously these guys were courted," he said.
What surprised Eisman were revelations that some of the analysts "were profiteering so blatantly" on the entree their TV jobs provided.
The more their television performances pleased Pentagon insiders, the greater their access, which in turn nurtured their business interests. Anyone who changed his tune was quickly banished, Barstow reported.
As both Eisman and Zinni note, it's natural for analysts to consult with former associates and for career military men to endorse the Pentagon perspective. "You can't blame them for being supportive of the troops," Zinni told me in an interview, "but they crossed the line when they began supporting the policy."
When they began "to mouth" the Pentagon story, he explained, they disowned the role retired senior military men are expected to play. "They are supposed to call out a policy that is flawed," Zinni said.
Not every analyst marched lock step with the Pentagon maestros. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who initially endorsed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, later denounced Rumsfeld for his "egregious arrogance and misjudgment." In 2005, one analyst balked after the death of 14 Marines, went off-script on Bill O'Reilly's show, and was fired from the analyst group.
Media watchdog groups have raised questions about the legality of the Pentagon's information strategy and demanded an investigation. On April 25, the Pentagon announced that the weekly briefings were being suspended indefinitely pending an internal review.
The overriding issue the Pentagon should assess is the degree to which dressing up propaganda as journalism undermines democracy. How can voters make intelligent choices in the face of such deception?
Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public. editor@pilotonline.com.