As their stranglehold on information is loosened, the MSM reacts more and more rabidly to alternative voices. Having set themselves in opposition to the Administration on the war, they profess to be outraged that the Pentagon has tried to bypass the media in getting its story out.
Which gets me to the Virginian Pilot’s Joyce Hoffman (“public editor”) second-hand smear of the Pentagon. She refers to a “staggering breach of public trust by Pentagon leaders,” designed to “sabotage traditional journalism.” Traditional journalism has done a remarkable job sabotaging itself in my lifetime so no help is needed on that front. In fact, the Virginian Pilot is up for sale and is not expected to get any bidders who are interested in this fish wrap as a business proposition. The likely buyer will be a wealthy individual with the means to support a mouthpiece fast approaching bankruptcy but who will want the power to smear his opponents with impunity.
But back to the “perfidious” Pentagon. Do you know what they did? Quoting a critic of the war – Retired General Zinni – the Pentagon created "cheerleaders for the Pentagon" in their roles as analysts on television news programs. In other words, the Pentagon decided it needed a counterbalance to the defeatism of the MSM. Imagine that! The Horror!
The retired military officers who appeared as analysts of military affairs on news programs are accused of having “huge financial stakes in and ideological commitments to the policies they were evaluating.” They are accused of “[meeting] regularly with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joints Chiefs of Staff, had access to classified intelligence, and were flown on Pentagon-financed trips to Iraq and Guantanamo.”
So let me get this right, they were provided with access to top decision makers and given access to the battlefield and Guantanamo and this is bad for people who are asked to provide analysis on these matters?
They had an ideological commitment to victory and this is bad?
Is that the complaint that Joyce Hoffman is making? And to prove their evil, Joyce Hoffman slams this final nail in their coffin: “The statements often contradicted reports from Baghdad-based journalists.”
Keep in mind as you read this analysis that these are the same journalists who reported from the recent battle of Basra that “Mookie” Sadr had won! That the government forces were roundly defeated! Once this sterling reporting was found to be “inoperative” news from that front disappeared from the pages of the MSM and Sadr is still in hiding in Iran.
The MSM which we are to rely on told us that Afghanistan was a quagmire after the first week of battle. That the elite Revolutionary Guard would eat our troops alive. That the battle in Iraq was lost. That we flushed the Koran down the toilet. That Islam is a religion of peace. And they seem to have forgotten that 9/11 ever happended.
Oh, and that Obama’s Philadelphia “Race Speech” in which he refused to disown Jeremiah Wright ranked right up there with the Gettysburg Address. I wonder if it sent a shiver up Joyce Hoffmann’s leg like it did Chris Matthews?
To get serious for a moment, the war we are in is a multi-phase war with involves perceptions and loyalties as much – or more – than bullets and bombs. The MSM has declared for the enemy or, at best, a disinterested neutral. For the Pentagon to allow the global perceptions of the war to be decided by the creepy denizens of the editorial offices of the Virginian Pilot or the NY Times would have been criminal misconduct.
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