Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press --As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories ... The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor ... Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. ... The Lincoln Group is involved, and the military's "Information Operations Task Force". Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday cited the proliferation of news organizations in Iraq as one of the country's great successes since the ouster of President Saddam Hussein.
posted on Nov 30, 2005 - View this thread

Fake news. How is it legal to present a commercial as real news, without any indication that it is a commercial? And when did it become legal to use government money (i.e. *my taxes*) to push partisan issues, as well as try to influence election politics?
posted on Mar 18, 2004 - View this thread

"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (PDF, 112k) "The Covert News Network", on Project MOCKINGBIRD - "Watergate muckraker Carl Bernstein uncovered a list of over 400 reporters and a coterie of publishers and media moguls who had basically been rubber-stamping CIA propaganda since the 1950s." Alex Constantine on Mockingbird. "Investigators digging into MOCKINGBIRD have been flabbergasted to discover FOIA documents in which agents boast (in CIA office memos) of  pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. " ( from Geoff Metcalf on Mockingbird). Cheryl Seal on Mockingbird, with additional links. Enjoy the election!
posted on Jan 20, 2004 - View this thread

"Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda." This quote, captured in a USA Today article, came from Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti in response to allegations that CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship."
posted on Sep 15, 2003 - View this thread

U.S. Army Used Media Cover in Iraq for Own Ends which sounds like a big old bowl of yellow journalism but isn't really, at least I don't think so. It was more to refute the Iraqi Minister of Lies talking about the whooping the Iraqi war machine was delivering to the coalition forces.

The main issue that the reporters had was that they were only getting the one side of the story and not the Iraqi perspective.

But it raises some questions about the supposed objectivity of the media. Is this a proper use of them? To help achieve military goals? Or to try to avoid more unnecessary deaths?
posted on Sep 8, 2003 - View this thread

Though you won’t hear about them , there are dozens of Pentagon P.R. officers embedded with reporters in Iraq.
posted on Apr 2, 2003 - View this thread

The return of the Movietone? "We fell on this idea of recreating films that looked like and were the length of the old Movietone forms of the 1940s," said Marine Lt. Col. Jim Kuhn, military producer for the undertaking called the Movietone Newsreel Project. Kuhn says the objective is to put together a short film that combines the commentary of real-life soldiers with the kind of footage civilian journalists would be unable to get. (more inside)
posted on Mar 13, 2003 - View this thread