Department of Propaganda Redux

First, thank you, Heather, for your comments. It was good to hear that someone is reading this and I appreciated your comments. As to intolerance, all of us are intolerant in some way or another, including me. I'm most intolerant of misrepresentation which is one of the reasons I'm writing this blog.

It is a journalistic misrepresentation to fake a by-line. When the Government does it, it's propaganda. This summer, the Bush administration appointed our first Minister of Propaganda (Karen Hughes, Deputy Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, an euphemism if there ever was one). Now the Pentagon is releasing stories to Iraqi newspapers under false by-lines and under false pretenses. Sounds like propaganda is becoming an accepted American practice to me, at least among our so-called leaders. That vibration you feel is Jefferson rolling in his grave.

Now when I was in the Air Force I was public affairs officer for four of my squadrons. We never really lied; we never painted anything in a negative light but at least we always stated truthfully who wrote the piece. It wasn't balanced journalism but we weren't writing for a civilian audience nor were we pretending to be a free press. Extending the practice to show only one side of an issue or to write to a pre-determined conclusion is spin, the practice of Karl Rove and the writers of those disguised advertising supplements in the Sunday papers. Spin isn't intended to be balanced or to inform. Its intent is to pursuade someone of a point, Bush's more-0f-the-same speech today before a is a prime example. If the Pentagon's one-sided reporting in Iraq were claimed by the Pentagon, it would be spin, people could read it and take it with a grain of salt or as gospel, depending on their opinion of the Pentagon. Instead, they hid the actual authors under paid Iraqi by-lines and paid editors to print the stories.

Here in the States, that material would have to have been marked "Paid Advertising" or some such. Iraq apparently has no such editorial scruples. The problem here is the lack of ethics: We're attempting to set up a democracy and a free press, then violating the ethics of a free press for short-term gain. This says to our nominal allies that propaganda is acceptable journalistic practice "as long as the ends are good." I'm sure many gulag residents (Soviet-era, not ours) would disagree.

Of course, no one at the actual Pentagon is claiming knowledge of this. Like torture, someone in the field did it without the higher-ups' knowledge. To any military veteran, this is about as plausible as saying that Headquarters didn't know the jets were flying under the ski lift cable - Headquarters knows what the field units are doing. That's their job. Donald It's Not an Insurgency Rumsfeld, Minister of War, claims we're setting up a free and open press in Iraq. That was yesterday. Today we find out that we're teaching our nominal allies what their previous government knew well, how to mislead the public in the name of a free press.