How the administration (still) manages (and fabricates) the news

Here are some excerpts from a report, last night, at NPR:

A private contractor has been providing the U.S. military in Afghanistan with reports on media coverage and on individual journalists.

Every day, commanders receive a briefing rating news stories as positive, negative or neutral, and profiles are often drawn up on journalists who ask to embed or to interview military commanders.

One of the journalist profiles obtained by NPR includes a statement of purpose that ends: "To gauge the expected sentiment of her coverage while on an embed mission in Afghanistan."

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The reports are compiled by the Rendon Group. The company also writes press releases, speeches and talking points. It also rates stories for the military: positive, negative or neutral.

A recent "positive" story was headlined "Canadian Helps Afghans Create First National Park." A "negative" one: "Three NATO Troops Killed in Southern Afghanistan."

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.Maj. Patrick Seiber, the press officer for the 101st Airborne Division, says that during his time in Afghanistan, he dealt with 62 different news agencies and 143 different reporters. He says he relied on the Rendon reports.

"Well, you got to have something, because we don't have enough public affairs guys that can go through and do it our own self," he says. "You got to know what you're dealing with. Our soldiers are at risk. Information is also a risk."

Seiber says he did pay some attention to negative ratings. If someone had many negative ratings, he says, he would want to know why.

"This didn't happen that often," he says. "Out of all those news agencies, I can only remember a couple of times there was somebody we didn't take ... because of their bent."

Both times, he says, the news agencies sent a different reporter.

Rendon Group... Rendon... Now where have we heard that name before.  Oh, right.  It was towards the end of 2005, Bush hell time.   Rolling Stone revealed a torture/interrogation session in which the CIA forced a false "confession" that Saddam was stockpiling nuclear weapons.

But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon. Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda.

The CIA's James Bamford later described for Amy Goodman how Rendon was used to feed disinformation to the likes of the New York Times' Judy Miller.

... Chalabi was -- he had been getting money from the C.I.A. up until the mid-1990s, and then he started getting money from the Pentagon after the C.I.A. failed to trust him any more. So, the other journalist that they called in was Paul Moran, who was a journalist working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And what makes this very interesting was how this came about. The people setting this up were members of the I.N.C. whose main goal all along from the very beginning was overthrowing Saddam Hussein anyway possible. And ironically, one of the people they called in, Paul Moran, had formerly worked for the I.N.C., and he had also worked for another company called the Rendon Group ...

And the beat goes on.  The co-opting of the media by government has a long tradition.  By the end of 2005 two respected journalists concluded:

The media crisis is not due to incompetent or corrupt journalists or owners, but rather to a highly concentrated profit-driven media system that makes it rational to gut journalism and irrational to provide the content a free society so desperately requires.

Apparently the new Democratic administration and a change-over in Congress have changed anything.  At the end of 2005, Rush Limbaugh was declaring that managed news was perfectly acceptable, and "special iPods were distributed in Afghanistan -- no music or fun, just 'truth.'"

To show off the new media in Afghanistan, AID officials invited Ms. Matalin, the former Cheney aide and conservative commentator, and the talk show host Rush Limbaugh to visit in February. Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners that students at a journalism school asked him "some of the best questions about journalism and about America that I've ever been asked."

One of the first queries, Mr. Limbaugh said, was "How do you balance justice and truth and objectivity?"

His reply: report the truth, don't hide any opinions or "interest in the outcome of events." Tell "people who you are," he said, and "they'll respect your credibility."

You know, this managed media thing kinda makes sense, doesn't it!  Makes things so much easier and clearer.  And the Rendon Group are still part of government (thanks now to the Obama administration)  and ready to assure you that you'll get all the news they think is good for you.