Today's Must Read - The Military-Media Dog-and-Pony Show

Actually, it's not fair to title it in this manner - it disparages dogs and ponies quite unfairly.

And, you'd likely see in the MSM, a story about a green puppy, before you see them cover the Pentagon bag-job of the contingent of military analyst puppets ...

Opps ... It looks like the green puppy story wins.

It is beyond outrageous that the Bush Grindhouse, and their Orwellian gang of thugs actually instituted this program, but that the media in this country marched in lock-step with it ... We can only hope that, when it comes time for these nitwit networks to renew their FCC licenses, this gets brought up and, hopefully, penalties result from it (like taking away their license would be a good start)

And just to add a little extra layer of unbelievability to it, Glenn Greenwald, yesterday, in his "How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words" laid out just how "in-your-face", SOP, nonchalant they went about doing it.

On the question of whether the Pentagon maintained an illegal covert domestic propaganda program -- and on the broader question of whether the American media's political coverage is largely shaped and controlled by the U.S. Government -- I don't believe it's possible to obtain more conclusive evidence than this:

So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.

Read the whole piece, as it contains copies of emails where they discuss this criminal action like they were discussing the days' weather.

But Wait, There's More!

And related to this is something that Barack Obama needs to weave into his stump speeches, for it captures the essence of the Bush Grindhouse most perfectly.

There was a document dump related this story, and it it, in one of the emails, TPM's Josh Marshall gets tagged by the Pentagon phonies as being a "Bush-bashing, uber-liberal"

Spencer Ackerman, writing on Think Progress, weighed in, defending Marshall.

And Ackerman pens the above-referenced recommendation for Obama;

Welcome to the next four years. These people have plunged the country into two failing/failed wars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. (Also, they pulled off a housing crisis and a healthcare crisis and an environmental crisis and when an entire city drowned the administration left the black people to die.) There’s no alibi: when conservatism had its chance to govern, this is what it yielded. If I was one of them, I’d bitch about Rajiv Chandrasekaran or Jeremiah Wright or whatever was necessary to distract people from what I did when I had the chance to do it. Get ready for years and years and years of this puerile and tiresome nonsense.

Nice to see the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid keeping certain things "off the table"

But there is still time ...


Bonus Links

NYT: How the Pentagon Spread Its Message

Ron Beasley: Quote of the Day +

Brave New Films: What's Wrong with a Little PsyOps?

Think Progress: Only Two News Networks Willing To Explain Their Role In Pentagon Propaganda Program

Cirque de Military Analysts