Well, why shouldn’t the Pentagon put its four-stars on the tube to ladle out patriotic talking points to the American public like mess hall stew?
There’s a straightforward quasi-honesty to government-managed news, which only has a weird feel because the Penta-pundits had to pose as impartial analysts and play along with the image the networks wanted to project: seriousness, independence, etc. How demeaning that their meetings with the Secretary of Defense had to be secret — an embarrassment awaiting ultimate exposure by the New York Times.
Let us consider the awkwardly evolving nature of war. Even as its psychological support diminishes among a public grown skeptical of any enterprise that requires ultimate sacrifice and absolute faith — and influenced, at least at the margins of its consciousness, by a permanent and growing pro-peace movement — it is more necessary than ever, as the engine that drives such a large part of the economy and makes so many people rich. The war machine can’t simply be dismantled. War must remain “inevitable.”
However, when our leaders want to stage one of these inevitable productions, they can’t just garner public support for it the old-fashioned way, with Nuremberg-style rallies to stoke up the enthusiasm.
Nor can they blithely layer their calls for strident, up-tempo patriotism or their dire warnings of enemy malice atop the business of daily life like so much propaganda wallpaper, and expect to be taken seriously.
Rather, as the New York Times account last month by David Barstow, on the “infiltration” of network news by paid military propagandists, made clear, they are reduced to acting like common conspirators, attempting to project authority and credibility — “information dominance” — through private media outlets. They must rally the support they need more by stealth than by command. How humiliating.
For instance, Barstow writes in his April 20 investigative piece (“Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand”): “Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: ‘I think our analysts — properly armed’ (with talking points, that is, of which there is no shortage) ‘— can push back in that arena.’”
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