Here's a follow-up to my earlier post about David Barstow winning a Pulitzer Prize.
One of the most significant dogs that did not bark after Barstow published his reports on the cozy relationship between "retired" military analysts (read: Pentagon mouthpieces) and various TV news channels was this: none of the TV stations ever addressed the reports on air. Never. Not once. As I recall, after Barstow's stories ran, a TV exec or two gave hand-wavy statements to newspaper reporters, and Brian Williams posted some sort of defense of NBC on his blog. But none of the stations ever acknowledged the stories during their news programs, and none ever changed their policies regarding disclosure of the underlying connections and conflicts of interest held by guys like Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
Coming back to the present, both Glenn Greenwald and Media Matters observed yesterday that when the various TV news programs reported this year's Pulitzer winners, none of them saw fit to mention Barstow, let alone why he won the Prize for investigative journalism. Glennzilla gives a useful perspective (emph. orig.):
So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico -- that's Howard Kurtz and Politico -- lambasted them for this concealment.
How significant a problem is this? Here's one measure, from Media Matters (emph. added):
Media Matters documented that between January 1, 2002, and May 13, 2008, the military analysts named in Barstow's article collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR in segments covering the Iraq war both before and after the invasion, as well as numerous other national security or government policy issues.
1 comment:
If this had been a purposeful program run by the Pentagon, it would have been managed from the Psy-Ops Office.
"Identify, Penetrate, Neutralize."
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