Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote discussing the recent LA Times piece on "propaganda" and the US military placing stories in Iraqi media. I think this article is worth a discussion for several reasons, not the least of which is the hyperventilating that Alter does in demonizing the straw man he sets up. You see, Alter's article attacks a "bunch of budding Jayson Blairs," yet presents no instances of false information printed in the stories.
He begins by acknowledging that this kind of thing went on in the past, that the CIA
"planted pro-American stories in the foreign press, often with the intention of making sure that elections in places like Greece and Turkey and Indonesia didn't end up with a victory for the communists. Until the mid-1970s, when all of this was exposed, these covert press operations were viewed within the government as a modest plus in the battle for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world."
I suspect they're still viewed within the government as "a modest plus in the battle for the hearts and minds of the rest of the world." We'll see later that Alter actually agrees. He questions the use of this technique in Iraq.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon was using U.S. troops to write positive articles about Iraq (for instance, heralding the opening of a school), hiring Washington-based contractors to translate the articles into Arabic, then secretly planting them in the Iraqi press with bribes.
Is it a terrible thing, really, to let Iraqis know a new school is open? Mr. Alter thinks so. The latter point, about the "bribes" (neutral phrasing would be "payments"), the military denies.
To this point Alter is simply against the practice. That's fine, it's his right to dissent. But then he jumps the shark, referencing a Rolling Stone story by James Bamford as evidence of the "venality of the Republican Washington." I read the article. Aside from the fact that Bamford takes every opportunity to present John Rendon of The Rendon Group as a haughty elitist, and aside from the fact that most of the associations he tries to establish are established primarily with innuendo, it's not at all clear that most of the activities he attributes to TRG are all that undesireable. For instance, Bamford writes:
His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam.
Here he conveniently neglects the fact that most of this activity occurred during the Clinton administration, and certainly wasn't halted by Clinton. He presents no factual basis for the assertion that Rendon set up the INC - we'll just take his word for it. And Bamford assigns a "transfer of secret authority" but gives no evidence that authority has been ceded in any of these activities. But how is setting up a PR situation that might assist in removing from power the man whom had recently been driven out of Kuwait undesireable?
But back to Mr. Alter's piece. He goes snarky on The Lincoln Group, a PR firm, and it's leader, Christian Bailey, referring to the latter as a fop ("a man who is much concerned with his dress and appearance") and questioning his British accent despite acknowledging that he was educated at Oxford. Alter's low road includes this sentence:
Bailey has put a bunch of Bush campaign hacks on the gravy train, finagled security clearances, then assigned them to corrupt the Iraqi media. Democracy in action!
"Campaign hacks?" "Finagled?" "Corrupt?" That's a lot of snarky innuendo for one sentence.
But the crowning moment for Alter is soon to arrive. He writes:
My problem with all of this is less ethical than practical. If it helped build Iraqi democracy or blunted anti-American propaganda, it might even be worth it (though certainly not at those prices). But exporting a bunch of budding Jayson Blairs simply feeds the perception of Americans as inept and hypocritical puppetmasters. If we won't withdraw our troops, can't we at least withdraw our ham-handed propaganda efforts? Can't we stop discrediting the truly independent Iraqi reporters and editors that American journalists are helping to train? Can't we grasp the elemental point that an entirely pro-American Arab media is, on its face, not credible in the region and therefore not helpful to the cause of Iraqi independence?
So he agrees that it is desireable if it helps build Iraqi democracy and blunts anti-American propaganda (you know, the stuff the other side is writing). However, these efforts are then immediately denigrated as faked ("Jayson Blairs") and ham-handed propaganda. Evidence? Mr. Alter produces not a single citation in support of this characterization. He does not reference a single article placed by the US in Iraqi media that contains falsehoods. Check that. He doesn't cite an article at all.
You might think such venom for a program that might "[help] build Iraqi democracy or [blunt] anti-American propaganda" would be due to finding repeated evidence of falsehoods and lies in the stories. You might think that to make such a case Mr. Alter would quote some of the atrocious misrepresentations from those stories.
You would be wrong. Instead we get acknowledgement that the program would be fine if it furthers our ends of Iraqi democracy and better will for America. And we get snark for "venal" Republican Washington.