Is Wartime Story Planting Bad?

Not about to be scooped by the LATimes, which broke the $50 payola story, the NYTimes surged forth today with a big expose on the Pentagon's media psyops operations. The story, Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive, is vast itself, a five-clicker, droning on and on in a journalistic alternative to waterboarding.

The story points out the difficulty faced in the media battlefield of the Great War on Terror:

As the Bush administration tries to build democracies overseas and support a free press, getting out its message is critical. But that is enormously difficult, given widespread hostility in the Muslim world over the war in Iraq, deep suspicion of American ambitions and the influence of antagonistic voices. The American message makers who are wary of identifying their role can cite findings by the Pentagon, pollsters and others underscoring the United States' fundamental problems of credibility abroad.

But that's just a high-in-the-story plant to put an objective stamp on what follows. The lens the NYT looks this through is obvious in this statement:

Many Iraqis say that no amount of money spent on trying to mold public opinion is likely to have much impact, given the harsh conditions under the American military occupation.

The statement is, of course, a lie on a couple fronts. First, a suspected lie: Who are these "many Iraqis" the sequestered NYT reporter spoke to? Not many. And the real lie, the "harsh conditions" quote, which flies in the face of the recent Oxford survey which found Iraqis overwhelmingly happy with better conditions.

But this article isn't about media-bashing. It's about whether they've got a point. Are we doing the wrong thing by working to influence the media in ways that might undercut the establishment of a truly free press?

Propaganda should be feared

There is reason to be concerned, because propaganda has a long and sordid history as the maidservant of tyrants. Today, the practice is alive and well, and far more refined than the clumsy work of the Nazis and Stalinists. A free press is impossible under Kim Il Jung, and Kim Il Jung is impossible under a free press.

But the Western press' infatuation with its own ability to bring down tyrants -- all hail Woodstein! -- is both overblown and not applicable in the war our psyops forces are waging.

Big-fish Nixon and dinky-fish Scooter notwithstanding, the real power of the free press in America is local, where a council member loses his seat when the local paper reveals his corruption, or as we saw in OC recently, when the paper shows that a local hospital has been behaving immorally. Such take-downs are common; whereas the national take-down is rare, and the media's role in them often overblown.

Bush: the ultimate take-down

But it is the perspective NYT writers look at Iraq through. They want a take-down of the "occupation forces," and they're hoping this story will become the next Abu Ghraib and further their cause.

That motivation of the elite, anti-war MSM is even more corrupt than the psyops media efforts, because everyone but the NYT and LAT expects the armed forces to wage a media war in tandem with the military war, but the big media still want the public to accept their lie that MSM is not waging its own war against Bush.

Iraqis see what's going on first hand in their country, and the sophisticated leadership circles also see what the American media reports out of Baghdad. That does more disservice to the establishment of a free press in Iraq than the military media campaigns.

As for the ethics of the media campaign, let's turn back the clock a bit. In an earlier age, we dropped leaflets out of the sky, telling citizens of hostile nations they were losing the war, and to come over to our side. The media did not complain about this, but the NYT story complains about radio stations and "iPod-like devices" that are used to tell our stories.

In an earlier age, Voice of America blasted through the Iron Curtain, reaching repressed lands with messages about freedom on the other side, and tyrants on theirs. No one complained.

Now, we have technology and the opportunity to use it. We can have multiple radio stations so different ethnicities and factions get customized programs. We have people on the ground who can work with Iraqi and Afghani media one-on-one. We have satelites and cell phones and Ipods and emails.

Truth is the issue

And we're not supposed to use these technologies? Of course we should, and we should use them to report the truth. As long as we report the truth, it doesn't matter if the media is identified as ours or not.

That subject -- the truthfulness of our psyops media efforts -- is one that's discounted by the media. They refer to psyop stories as "truthful but one-sided." In case you missed it, that's still truthful. More truthful, in fact, than their reporting, according to this post from Blackfive:

"[UPI CORRESPONDENT] PAM HESS: If there's a criticism to be made of the American media…[it] is that we are quite vigilant about U.S. propaganda. We are less so about insurgent propaganda. The 24-hour news cycle feeds into that, but we don't quite know what to do with the information that they send us, so it becomes he said-she said reporting." (h/t Jim)

To rephrase Ms. Hess' comment, the insurgent/terrorist forces are winning the propaganda war. Faced with this, the NYT, LAT and others are wringing their hands, not over the implications of beheaders and suicide bombers controlling the media through fear and intimidation, but over the military telling the truth.

No, it's not the truth as journalists are supposed to tell it, but the journalists are not reporting the truth. The real story here is that psyops might not be as important if MSMops were doing a more balanced and objective job of reporting.