Summary
Even though President Obama is expected to preside over a new era of government transparency, it seems that the gears of the Pentagon’s ‘message machine’ are still turning.
Analysis
Last week, Stars and Stripes revealed business links between the Pentagon and PR firm The Rendon Group. Apparently, the latter was under contract to provide ‘briefs’ profiling journalists covering the war in Afghanistan. While the taxpayer-funded $1.5 million dollar contract has since been terminated by the Pentagon, this episode reveals that the Pentagon is still actively engaged in distorting information meant for American domestic consumption.
While the Pentagon maintains that the program was meant to ensure that reporters got the most ‘suitable’ embed, the briefs reportedly proved instrumental in the dismissal of two reporters that were casting the war in a negative light.
The actual content of the reports leave little room for debate over what purpose they serve. P.J Tobia, a thrice-embedded reporter currently based in Kabul, was able to get a hold of his profile report through military connections. His report’s preamble states that one of the purposes of the memo is, “to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on embed in Afghanistan.”
The Rendon Group briefs categorized a reporter’s coverage along a negative-neutral-positive spectrum by carefully reviewing all of their past work and taking note of the political leaning of where it was published. For example, Tobia’s report indicates that one of his past articles was picked up in, “New York’s left leaning Village Voice [magazine].” Therefore, based on their own description of the program, the Pentagon’s suitability criterion for embedded reporters in Afghanistan incorporates some degree of political affiliation.
Tobia’s brief ends with a section titled Expectations for Embed, which reads, “Based on his previous embed and past reporting, it is unlikely that he will miss an opportunity to report on U.S. military missteps. However…he will remain sympathetic to U.S. troops and may acknowledge a learning curve in Afghanistan.”
The Rendon Group profiling contract is reminiscent of the Pentagon’s Bush-era message machine, a group of retired military officials with close ties to military contractors that were deployed on network news channels to echo administration talking points from an apparently independent standpoint.
Interestingly, even the message machine, or ‘message force multiplier’ program, employed a third party firm to profile the military analysts involved. At the time, the Pentagon paid Omnitec Solutions hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that all of the military analysts in question weren’t deviating from the agreed-upon line. Omnitec would sift through any interview, whether it took place on cable news or YouTube, and vet the analyst’s responses.
The fact that the Pentagon is still engaging in information manipulation aimed at domestic audiences is not surprising. During the Bush years, the belief that the Vietnam War was lost on poor domestic propaganda was pervasive at the highest levels of the military’s leadership. It is this core belief that gave rise to several programs meant to artificially maintain domestic support for the War on Terror.
Even if the Obama administration is true to the image of being a force for transparency in Washington, an institutional culture like that which flourished at the Pentagon is slow to change.
If these programs continue to be investigated and brought to light, the Pentagon’s days in domestic propaganda could be numbered. However, since the programs in question tend to serve the interests of the Pentagon as an institution – that is, to perpetuate the fighting of wars – the Pentagon cannot be expected voluntarily relinquish any influence over the domestic media that was gained during the Bush years.
Zachary Fillingham is a contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com
