Pentagon unit created to combat "innacurate" news

I’ve been telling my students for years not only to read the news, but to seek out alternative sources in order to try to hear the lucid somewhere within the noise. As if mainstream press didn’t make this hard enough, apparently the Pentagon now wishes to further complicate matters. According to the BBC, they’ve just created a new unit—let’s call it the “Ministry of Truth”—which is specifically designed to fight what they call “inaccurate” news. Specifically, they are going after internet news and blogs.

How, you might ask? “A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit will ‘develop messages’ for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to ‘correct the record’. A spokesman said the unit would monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ ’surrogates’, or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100906.stm

(As an aside, I would like to know if “employ” is literal or figurative in this case. Can you imagine the Defense Department paying politicians to disseminate their talking points? Is this like a bonus? Don’t our tax dollars already pay them to do that? Indeed, don’t the lobbyists already pay the politicians to do that for them? What a lovely circle: K-Street pays Congress which writes the budget which pays Defense which pays Congress and K-Street…)

Eric Ruff, Pentagon press secretary, added that "the move to set up the unit had not been prompted either by the eroding public support in the US for the Iraq war or the US mid-term elections next week." And for those who find this a somewhat conspicuous remark, the Big Guns have been talking about this for a while. Earlier this year, Mr Rumsfeld said of the enemy's success at "manipulating the media": "That's the thing that keeps me up at night." Meanwhile, Mr Bush and Mr Cheney have both expressed their fears that the enemies of the US are "trying to influence public opinion in the US."

Did everybody get all that? According to the Department of Defense and the White House, public opinion has turned against the war neither because of faulty planning and botched implementation and generally a maelstrom of stupidity, nor because there is accurate and relevant information coming out of Iraq. Rather, it the public would be all for the war except for the terrorists who are successfully manipulating their media consumption. Does that mean that the BBC is run by terrorists because in the same article they announced the 100th US troop death this month? Further, how is the Pentagon going to combat such attempts to influence opinions and such dissemination of inaccuracies? Bomb the BBC?

And then there are the bloggers. I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone who daily checks Terror-blog.com or Suicides-R-Us.org (non-profit--they don't need much money, although the writers change daily). Or does this mean that Blogger and YouTube have regular contributors who are al-Qaeda members?

Sorry for all the bad jokes, but I'm genuinely trying to follow the argument here. What is so "inaccurate" about the miniscule amount of information possessed by the average American regarding Iraq? Who are these people "manipulating the media," and by what means do they achieve such? Sure, I have no doubt that those who wish to shove America out of Iraq are delighted by the fact that nearly all stories coming out of Iraq describe it as a black hole, and that the Democrats look poised to sell their souls for power by pulling us out of the country. I'll also concede that they would be utterly retarded not to increase their attacks given this impending scenario. But I fail to recognize the misinformation in need of correction. Is the Pentagon--or their "surrogates", the top politicians and lobbyists--going to disabuse us of the fact that oil production, access to electricity and potable water, and school attendance are lower than prewar levels, that the chance of kidnapping and violent death are exponentially greater than when Mr Hussein was in power, and that the UN estimates over a million displaced Iraqis? Are they going to tell us that the daily number of attacks and deaths is actually far less than the lies we hear?

"The Bush administration does not believe the true picture of events in Iraq has been made public." I must say, I am terribly interested to hear what the true picture really is then. But something tells me that if the Pentagon needs to create a "media war" unit which monitors blog traffic and "employs" politicians and lobbyists (who are obviously already sympathetic to the Bush administration) in order to get more airtime for their own talking points... Well, does this sound to you like things are going great but people are confused, or that things are going so terrible as to require a propaganda machine? For make no mistake: this is not hyperbole. This is textbook propaganda.

It is really annoying how often, and how precisely, recent events have confirmed Orwell's prescience. Nostradamus has got nuthin’ on that guy.

-W.

(Although this is the top story for BBC World News, I just looked at CNN, MSNBC, FOX, ABCNEWS, New York Times, Washington Post--I even searched Yahoo and Google with Mr Rumsfeld's direct quotes from the BBC article--and found nothing on this story. I did, however, find an article on the frontpage of al Jazeera News. Thus, either the Department of Defense has nothing to worry about because no one is paying attention anyway, or the new unit is already really effective. Both possibilities scare me.)