Rumsfeld declares war on 'bad'
press By Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON - Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld has signaled that he plans to intensify a
campaign to influence global media coverage of the
United States, a move that is likely to heighten
the debate over press freedom and propaganda-free
reporting.
Speaking at the Council on
Foreign Relations in New York last week, Rumsfeld
said Washington would launch a new drive to spread
and defend US views, especially on the "war on
terror".
He cited the Cold War-era
initiatives of the US Information Agency and Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, widely viewed outside the
United States as
sophisticated propaganda outlets, as a model for
the new offensive.
If similar efforts over
the past five years are any example, the campaign
is likely to take place in two main areas - the US
media and the press in the Arab and Muslim worlds,
where Washington sees its strategic influence as
pivotal.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld also said
the Pentagon was "reviewing" its practice of
paying to plant good news stories in the Iraqi
news media, contradicting a previous assertion
that the controversial propaganda program had been
halted.
Critics in Washington say the new
media blitz joins a long list of decisions by the
administration of President George W Bush, such as
ordering the National Security Agency to spy on US
citizens without warrants, monitoring library
records and compiling databases on US citizens who
disagree with the administration's policies, that
are leading the country down an authoritarian path
- ironically, one that is not far from those
Middle Eastern regimes that have long clamped down
on freedom of expression and independent
journalism.
And they note that the US
mainstream media already tend toward a
conservative interpretation of events, with scant
regard for opposing views.
According to a
study released this month by the Washington-based
media organization Media Matters for America,
conservative voices have considerably outnumbered
liberal voices for the past nine years on the
Sunday morning television news shows, considered
among the pinnacles of US journalism.
The
report analyzed the content of influential shows
such as NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face
the Nation, and ABC's This Week. It
classified each of the nearly 7,000 guests who
appeared during the 1997-2005 period as either
Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive or
neutral. It found that guests opposing the Bush
administration's policies, during both terms, were
given only enough space to maintain a veneer of
fairness and accuracy. Congressional opponents of
the Iraq war, for example, were mostly missing
from the Sunday shows, particularly during the
period just before the war began in March 2003.
"If conservative dominance in this major
arena of [US] public opinion-making continues as
it has in the past nine years, it may have serious
consequences for future policy debates and
elections," said David Brock, president of Media
Matters for America.
"This study should
serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks they
are seeing balanced discourse on Sunday mornings -
and to those responsible for producing this
[unbalanced] programming," he said.
Rumsfeld's plan would almost certainly
seek to bolster such sympathetic reporting. In his
speech, the US military chief used war terminology
to refer to the media. He said that "some of the
most critical battles may not be in the mountains
of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq, but in
newsrooms - in places like New York, London, Cairo
and elsewhere".
According to Jim
Naureckas, editor of Extra!, a magazine put out by
the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR), "They see the mutilation of
information that reaches the public as a key part
of their war strategy, and I think that is a very
dangerous way for the military to be looking at
their job in a democracy.
"When people
talk about the 'home front' they do not realize
what sinister implications that has. The public is
seen as another front that the military is
fighting out."
Rumsfeld recommended that
the media be part of every move in the "war on
terror", including an increase in Internet
operations, the establishment of 24-hour press
operations centers, and training military
personnel in other channels of communication.
He said the government would work to hire
more media experts from the private sector and
that there would be less emphasis on the print
press.
The State Department is also
stepping up its propaganda efforts. Last week,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked for
US$74 million to expand broadcasting and Internet
campaigns in Iran, as well as to promote student
exchanges, in order to destabilize the regime
there.
But to many independent media
analysts, the Bush administration has too often
confused propaganda with facts and information. "I
think that in the Pentagon world view, facts
become instrumentalized," Naureckas said.
"The point of putting out information is
to achieve your military objectives. It's not to
serve truth in some kind of abstract sense. And
once you start looking at it this way, the
difference between a true statement and false
statement really becomes very little."
The
Bush administration has had some success in
influencing the media at home in the US, a country
with generally sophisticated and discerning media
operations.
Last week, US lawmaker Henry
Waxman and other senior Democratic leaders
released a new study by the Government
Accountability Office (GAO), a congressional
oversight body, which found that the Bush
administration spent a whopping $1.6 billion on
public relations and media over the past
two-and-a-half years to sway public opinion.
"The government is spending over a billion
dollars per year on PR and advertising," said
Waxman. "Careful oversight of this spending is
essential given the track record of the Bush
administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to
fund covert propaganda within the United States."
The opposition Democrats had asked the GAO
to conduct that study after evidence emerged last
year that the Bush administration had commissioned
"covert propaganda" from PR firms that pushed
video news releases that appeared to regular
viewers as independent newscasts.
The
report found that the administration's PR and
advertising contracts spanned a wide range of
issues, including message development presenting
"the army's strategic perspective in the global
war on terrorism".
The study found that
the Pentagon spent the most on media contracts,
worth $1.1 billion. And all that money was before
the new Rumsfeld plan.
