The New York Times published this morning a great article on how the US administration shapes information by putting its military analysts on major news channels.
Here are some of the highlights but I strongly recommend reading the full article:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts†whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.
In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.
Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers†or “surrogates†who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages†to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.â€