Glenn Greenwald depresses me. His latest: Our military has been subverting the media with nicely tailored propaganda. I know, I know, so what else is new…but this is straight from Pentagon memos.
I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a “hot list” of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .
Read the whole thing. Keep it in mind, too, when you see those talking heads on Fox and CNN: those guys are saps who have been suckered by the military. Why do you get your news from the must gullible parrots on TV?
I hate my country.
I’m gonna hate myself for saying this, but I think there are at least two ways to interpret this.
The media is indeed full of jackals. Having dealt with them on various issues related to nonprofit research (especially on sharks), you do tend to learn which ones are going to spin what you say totally out of control, and which ones are actually going to report the actual information you give them accurately.
Example: We were doing work on Basking shark migration patterns off the coast of CA for a few years. After seeing regular appearances of baskers off the northern CA coast for many years, late in the study, the baskers simply disappeared, and really haven’t been seen in any numbers since.
When asked by the media why this was, we specifically told all who interviewed us that basically we didn’t really know, but that there could be a number of reasons, like shifts in current patterns changing the local distribution of their favorite foods (they’re planktivores), or maybe there might be some fishing pressure on them in non-US waters (they tend to migrate widely, and there is a shark-fin industry in some of the countries where they go), which is one of the reasons we were tagging and tracking them.
Most media outlets would report what we said accurately (that we simply didn’t really know, but were trying to find out), but a few would essentially play the histrionics game, and say something like:
“Scientists say overfishing driving Basking Sharks to extinction”.
which would of course garner us some incoming flak from potential granting agencies who would read these stories and think that we actually told the media that Baskers were near extinction.
so, after having various media outlets misreport what we would say in interviews repeatedly, you finally start to get the message that some are going to be more worth your time to interview with than others.
That said, I’m not saying that there isn’t a deliberate attempt to find media outlets that won’t even bother to check facts and figures when receiving information from the military *cough*FeuxNews*cough*, but the issue of spin exists on both sides of the communication equation.
In this particular case, the choice of wording: friends, tips on stories to focus on, etc., does suggest that there is a deliberate attempt to spin the information on the part of the military.
OTOH, they’ve been doing that since WWI, so part of me just wants to say:
what else is new?
…heh, having just read the media take on the Platypus genome, I think many will see where I was coming from in the above post.
The sad thing is, nothing about this surprises me. Not even a little.
We were always at war with Eastasia.
Fox and CNN: those guys are saps who have been suckered by the military. Why do you get your news from the must gullible parrots on TV?
What a callous insult to actual parrots. Poor Polly.
Aye, agreed, calling them parrots is an insult to true psittacines! (I’m sure Alex would have been a far better newscaster, if he had been given the chance.)
I wouldn’t even call them gullible, I think they are for the most part more than happy to collude in the misrepresentation because a) it makes their lives easier and b) it agrees with the demographic they pretend informing anyway.
Come on, can you see Fox criticizing the military?
There’s very little actual journalism on TV. It’s all ratings-driven infotainment.
There is still good journalism in this country, you just won’t find it on TV.
There is no bottom to this administration.
Hitchens’ quip about becoming a journalist so that he doesn’t have to get his news from journalists seems ever more apropos. I recall on an episode of skeptics guide to the universe that featured Hitch, he was commenting that even for many journalists, the ability to parse through the bullshit was never very good.
So when the journalists that arn’t immediately bought off can’t find their way, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture for a gullible public that then must sift through either blatant bullshit, or fuzzy journalism.
Although the question could then be asked, “Has it ever been any other way?”
Shouldn’t that be ILLEGAL?
That’s so messed up.
Our TV news is full of lap dogs.
Cut the military budget. NOW.
CIA has moved to DoD. The military analysts are now working with the CIA analysts. Like Plame’s domestic intelligence work at NSA and try at No Fear legislation and domestic wiretapping; we’re seeing the military analysts getting close work with CIA analysts. The operations of DIA DoD are still in court trying to get the CIA domestic operations laws so they can work equally. The NSA was a good penetration starting point for CIA because of the ‘need’ for linguists under the Director and the natural fitting of those CIA linguists at DoD NSA. Besides, Plame’s dad work at NSA for Air Force and all the CIA Directors are x Air Force.
I found this to be one of the best summaries for the current administrations policies.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
Given how much ALL of the news services are shafting the good parts of the military (for example, talking about all problems in Iraq as problems in ALL of Iraq, with ALL Iraqis, rather than pointing out that the problems are in a few areas in Iraq, with a small group of Iraqis and outside troublemakers. I can’t really blame the Military for trying to get people to see things their way.
I think we need to make a distinction between the people in the military who are trying to bring stability and peace to a hellish place, and the dirty politicians who destabilized the region by sending them there in the first place.
OMG! Next thing you know, they will have a PR department, media officers, and be hiring marketing firms!
I fail to see what is news here. Does PZ vet all his blog posts with the Institute for Creation Research?
Stop thinking of MSM talking heads as fools. They are whores. They know what they’re doing and they’re doing it well. Their johns are the multinational corporations that buy ad space.
Can there ever be a better example of the dreaded 24 pt. capitalized, bolded “F word”?
If you think that this country didn’t learn anything from the Vietnam experience, you are naive. Unfortunately, what the Pentagon learned the best is that if the message is framed, there are a lot of suckers that can be fooled for varying amounts of time before they wake up. Some, apparently, never.
After working in broadcast news, I learned that journalism is something which is rarely practiced. Integrity is often replaced by the popular sentiment, and news coverage is based mainly on what the station’s competitors are airing. Getting the facts right and providing fair and thorough coverage is often not as important as getting the story quickly and easily. It is my opinion that all broadcast news should be taken with at least several grains of salt.
Re #5 and #6,
That’s why they’re the “must gullible.” (most?) Real parrots are much smarter that this. . . .
Since no one else has bothered to say this yet:
I don’t. Nor do very many of the people I know who are under the age of 50. The Internet really is going to “win” the information wars, if it hasn’t already.
I’ve been pointing out Glenn’s work too. Of course, I don’t have anything close to your daily readership. But after a three-year hiatus and moving my URL, I don’t expect a large one, either.
OTOH, I’m getting ready to get my tax (US) blog going. So, who knows, maybe I’ll end up the tax blog guru. :rollseyes:
“Shouldn’t that be ILLEGAL?”
It is.
Unfortunately, what the Pentagon learned the best is that if the message is framed, there are a lot of suckers that can be fooled for varying amounts of time before they wake up. Some, apparently, never.
oh, that message is as old as dirt:
http://home.earthlink.net/~tjneal/goering.jpg
@#16 Bill the Cat —
So…sucking heads?
The saddest thing is that I don’t find any of this remotely surprising.
Is this the actual defense that wingnuts came up with for this issue?
Bill r,
There is a small difference between the military having their own internal PR, and on the other hand the military using outside journalists who are not labeled as military PR, when in reality, that is what they’ve become. See, the way it’s supposed to work is the military says something to the journalists and they report their own objective opinions on it to us. Not the military reports to journalists, who then make sure their opinion is whatever the military wants it to be.
As the pentagon itself said, “it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves” so all you’ll ever hear is what the military wants you to hear.
“Why do you get your news from the must gullible parrots on TV?”
Since no one else has bothered to say this yet:
I don’t. Nor do very many of the people I know who are under the age of 50. The Internet really is going to “win” the information wars, if it hasn’t already.
Some may be interested in this article – “Has the Internet Changed the Propaganda Model?”:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/6068
One word: Minipax.
Sorry – my formatting screwed up. Everything before “Some may be…” was a quotation from #20. Apologies to xebecs.
I don’t know if it is still true, but during the Reagan years the federal gvt. was the largest employer of pr people in the US. The DoD was the largest employer of them in the fed gvt. The only US agency prohibited from publicizing its activities was the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Of course the readership here is above corporate media. Too bad the masses who vote in elections are not.
This isn’t something to ho-hum about.
OK, so george Orwell was off by a few years…
‘Ministry of Truth’ ring any bells?
BoxerShorts@8:
I wouldn’t even call it “infotainment”. What they are trying to feed us is nothing more than good old fashioned gossip. For every one of us who turns the channel when Paris Hilton is mentioned and who don’t click on links about Lindsey Lohan or Britney Spears there are a hundred people gobbling it up.
I pretty much stopped watching 24 hour news channels when they became all-OJ-all-the-time and never really cared for network news. Before then I checked occasionally to see what was going on in the world, mainly on Headline News (obviously before loon Glenn Beck!) because they didn’t have time to harp on garbage and spew opinions. Did they ever develop the ability to focus on more than one story at a time? They seemed to realize that the Gary Condit stuff was total crap for a while after 9/11 but then it got even more vapid, which I couldn’t believe was possible. Yes, worse than the Amy Fisher fetish which spawned roughly a bajillion movies of the week. Amazing. Worse than the Bobbits, worse than the Menendez brothers, worse than Tonya Harding, and worse than Jon-Benet Ramsey. The news doesn’t have a liberal bias, it has a stupid bias. The stupid are the target audience and in that way these networks have achieved their goals.
@#33 Mena —
Yeah, TV news is a capitalistic venture like anything else, and as such will pander to the beliefs of its target audience. So you have the Fox channel, which carries “fair and balanced” “news” pandering to the LCD of the neo-con faction (who tend to be the people that get their news from TV) side-by-side with cartoon & drama shows that are targeted to the more “liberal” viewers (eg: Simpsons, Family Guy, House MD, etc). It’s a win/win for them. Fox isn’t conservative or liberal, republican or democratic, left- or right-wing; it’s simply corporate.
What’s really dangerous is that the government is taking advantage of the competitive, capitalistic nature of private news media (which, while flawed [as outlined above], is still far preferable to a wholly government-controlled news media) in order to “weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves.” It’s turning a superficially independent news outlet into a government puppet using the very economic system that sets up those independent news outlets, and hoping we won’t notice.
OK, I’m probably going to get the figurative DRE for this, but here goes…
It’s not that the talking heads on FOX and CNN have been bamboozled by the military…most are FORMER military. And to expect that they will happily point out that their life’s work (if you will) was…(at best) pointless is unreasonable, given that the military is not conducive to fostering intellectual honesty. Indeed, one often sees this in the scientific world among those who have been trained to know better. As an example: it takes years of effort by many people to put together, debug, run, and update climate models. Investigator’s livelihoods, reputations, job advancement are all invested in this. So when faced with the possibility that the model is not providing an accurate representation of the processes involved, often the reaction is disproportionate (by people who, in this case, have been trained to know better).
No, it’s not the saps on CNN and FOX who should know better…it’s the saps (ie us) in the audience who should be taught to know better.
I don’t. Nor do very many of the people I know who are under the age of 50. The Internet really is going to “win” the information wars, if it hasn’t already.
Go to the comments section of just about any site, or spend 5 minutes reading freerepublic, then come back here and look me in the eye when you say that.
The internet is just as likely to win the misinformation wars.
But why blame the media? After all, reality requires more than knee-jerk reactions and a bag of cheetohs, what audience are you going to have?
At least people over 50 are more likely to have an attention span longer than that of a goldfish. (No, I’m not over 50, but I know a lot of reality based peope who are)
All right, Costanza. Valid points, especially that the saps in the audience should be taught to know better. However, you’re missing a little something: there were plenty of military analysts, former military men, who were deeply critical of the Iraq war and dismayed enough at what was happening to speak out. They got shut out, totally ignored.
Read the article:
Or, to put this more simply: the military singled out pro-war analysts, spoon-fed them information that would make them more valuable to the networks, and thus shut military analysts who dissented from the party line completely out.
And the bastards at the networks, instead of actually investigating, just took the sweet ripe apples the military handed them in the form of these spoon-fed analysts, and fed the propaganda to the public undigested.
They left those who could have given a more balanced perspective rotting.
None of us should be getting our news from the networks. It’s not news, it’s Pravda cross-bred with The National Enquierer.
The news is generally not about what is new, it is about the continuum of the regular, and as we listen we are assured that even with all its dangers, we are being looked after by those who know better than us how to manage the tru–, ahh, the facts of the matt–, that is, the spin.
Come to think of it, we’re all pretty good at this particular skill of spinning. Trouble is, not many of us are very good at recognizing it in talking heads. After all, talking heads look confident and seem to understand what they are report– I mean reading.
These days, people actually pay to watch commercially supported Tee Vee and that is their primary source of information about the world at large.
Think long on that.
What I find most shocking about this is the fact that so few are speaking up about this. Thank you for linking to it, PZ. More people need to know just how badly our media and the public were swindled in this matter.
They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with hiding their shame just because they own the broadcasting equipment.
Now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I am forced to posit that if the evening news had an odor, it would smell like air.
Actually, the Marines were quite proficient at it during WWII. And if there were a “Ministry of Truth” (Pravda) you wouldn’t be reading about it on the MSM or the internet. It would go down the memory hole.
The armed forces are as political as any other large body. They have learned the need to control information flow just like any other large organization.
Michael X, to your point there is only a small difference. Its about the size of the difference between Obama/Hillary/McCain internal PR function and the favored journalists they provide “background”/”off the record” feeds to.
Quite all right. Anyway, it was really one of Wilde’s.
When are people going to realize that the crap on television is entertainment not news??
SC #27,
the article you have linked to conludes with what is, in my view, a fairly correct and balanced view with which I tend to agree (quite different from yours as a matter of fact):
Also, if I may add, I wouldn’t yet discount someone like Rupert Murdoch. Despite my profound disdain for his worldview, he has a formidable strategic vision and the resources necessary that could help him to establish strong positions across all platforms and keep up with the transition from offline to online.
Next step: State-run television, dosing its viewers with pats on the head and a soothing, authoritative voice telling us, “It’s all okay. We’re the good guys.” They can model the takeover on the example set by Fox News.
Until we are finally rid of the administration that authorized the propaganda, maybe I’ll just switch to Al Jazeera.
Because we prefer the gullible parrots who agree with us.
(Five, four, three…)
“I hate my country.”
Then you are a useless pile of shit. We need people who still care enough to save it. Just fucking leave from the God Squad. Or just kill yourself, and get someone to record it and YouTube it, because I like seeing useless dog rapers leave this world.
FORCE CONGRESS TO IMPEACH GEORGE BUSH AND DICK CHENEY, call Nancy Pelosi @ 1-202-225-0100 and DEMAND IMPEACHMENT. DC business hours only, call often, and spread it around.
Thanks, XTC, for this clear demonstration that nationalism is just as effective a generator of poisonous hatred as any religion.
Given how much ALL of the news services are shafting the good parts of the military (for example, talking about all problems in Iraq as problems in ALL of Iraq, with ALL Iraqis, rather than pointing out that the problems are in a few areas in Iraq, with a small group of Iraqis and outside troublemakers. I can’t really blame the Military for trying to get people to see things their way. YoungLinguist
Those actively attacking the occupiers (and other Iraqis) are a relatively small minority, but all polls I’m aware of show clear majorities wanting the occupiers out quickly, and when the question is asked, large minorities or even majorities agreeing that attacks on them are justified. Most Iraqis appear to regard the occupiers as “outside troublemakers”. The US military high command, which is responsible for media strategy, shares the politicians’ responsibility, and has actively obstructed, and in some cases arrested or even murdered, independent journalists in Iraq.
First of all, Nick Gotts, if Alex hates this country, he IS totally useless. He should move on. It has nothing to do with nationalism. Why would you stay where you hate to be? Why would you waste any effort to improve where you hate? This country is full of America-haters that need to move on.
Secondly, having skimmed all the comments, everyone seems to agree that you can’t get news from TV. Some of you claim you can get news from the Internet. But none of you say where you can get objective unbiased news from. I suspect that you are all afraid to mention where you get your news from. Because you know you will be blasted by someone else who just knows that that source is biased. As most of them are.
What is left then? Take each piece of news with a grain of salt and take two grains for each opinion. Occasionally read media analysis sites. Read Glen Greenwald. Use your intelligence as best you can. It’s the only thing you have left.
First of all, Nick Gotts, if Alex hates this country, he IS totally useless. He should move on. It has nothing to do with nationalism. Why would you stay where you hate to be? Why would you waste any effort to improve where you hate? This country is full of America-haters that need to move on.
First, how do you know Alex resides in the USA?
Second, if he does, why should he leave, unless he has no legal right to stay?
Third, how do you know he’s totally useless? He could be working as a medic, a conservationist, a lawyer, a scientist, be helping people or advancing knowledge, whether he hates the country he’s in or not.
Fourth, of course XTC’s spewings are nationalist. So is your first paragraph – I get the distinct sense you only just managed to avoid saying “America, love it or leave it.” in so many words.
The military is historically well versed in using propaganda. Stars and Stripes comes to mind…news packaged with a pro-military slant. Every field grade officer, majors and above, receives training in media relations/manipulation in their advanced Professional Military Education (PME). It suprises you people that we do it or that we’re good at it? The press has lapsed in its responisbility to question everything the government does and gives the people what they want; slick, packaged, feel-good drivel.