From MSM giant Gannett’s Q-ship Navy Times a USA Today piece: New DoD Web sites counter enemy rhetoric. Listen to the the oxen loudly protest being gored.
“This is about trying to control the message, either by bypassing the media or putting your version of the message out before others (and) … there’s a heavy responsibility to let people know where you’re coming from,” said Amy Mitchell, deputy director at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Excellence?
The Web sites suggest a pattern of Pentagon efforts to promote its agenda by disseminating information through what appear to be independent outlets, said Marvin Kalb, a fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
“This is deliberate deception, and it’s bad … (because) it weakens the image of journalism as an objective bystander,” Kalb said, noting that many of the Pentagon’s intended audiences live in a world where they expect the government to control their news. “We’re the exception, and unfortunately, we begin to look more and more like the rest of the world when we do this sort of thing.”
The illusion of journalism as an objective bystander was debunked for a lot of people in February, 1968 and never bought in to at all by many. Watergate confirmed the suspicion. The MSM was in the tank for the North Vietnamese, the Nixon-haters, the Reagan-haters, the Bush-haters. They want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but in their eyes the comfortable are always from one political party.
Sounds like the ‘Trans-Regional Web Initiative’ is up and running.
Posted in Old Media
