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December 02, 2005
Spinning Iraq: Immoral, Ineffective or Both?
Why am I not surprised to discover that the U.S. military is paying a contractor to manufacture pro-U.S. articles that Iraqi publications are secretly paid to publish? That's right: Because the administration did virtually the same damn thing here in the United States. As you may recall, the main difference is that the secret beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse here in the U.S. were freelancer (or freelancers, who knows?) and columnists rather than newspapers and radio stations. (Speaking of largesse, The Hill notes that many of the former colleagues of bribe-glutton and ex-Republication Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham "are mulling what to do with tens of thousands of dollars they received in campaign contributions from Cunningham’s co-conspirators." Hey, life's a bitch.)
"As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles, written by U.S. military 'information operations' troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times."
Kudos to LAT reporters Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi for their scoop, although you gotta wonder if it was practically handed to them given one clearly pissed-off anonymous source: " 'Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq. Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it,' said a senior Pentagon official who opposes the practice of planting stories in the Iraqi media." He or she must be late to the party. All the reigning rulers plant propaganda.
The lucky contractor churning out what the LAT calls "basically factual" but one-sided news stories is the Lincoln Group. The unsurprisingly closed-mouth company "won a $100 million contract with the Special Operations Command to assist with psychological operations," according to GovExec.com, which covers the Lincoln Group's sketchy history and the founder's Republican ties. (You just know the author got carpel tunnel trying to google the company into submission.) The 30-something founder, it turns out, has a Silicon Valley connection. Hey Dan Gillmor, know anything about Christian Bailey? He apparently moved to SF in the late 1990s, started an e-commerce company called Express Action in 1999, sold it, and moved on to better and clearly bigger things.
There are a couple of amusing items in the LAT piece.
"The military's effort to disseminate propaganda in the Iraqi media ... comes as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in basic journalism skills and Western media ethics, including one workshop titled 'The Role of Press in a Democratic Society.' Standards vary widely at Iraqi newspapers, many of which are shoestring operations."
Even though many of them are enormous profit-making enterprises, standards must vary widely among U.S. newspapers as well. How else to explain this nifty new reward program? (In the U.S., government propaganda is bad, while corporate propaganda is simply business as usual.) Then there's the following quote, which made me chuckle.
"Daniel Kuehl, an information operations expert at National Defense University at Ft. McNair in Washington, said that he did not believe that planting stories in Iraqi media was wrong. But he questioned whether the practice would help turn the Iraqi public against the insurgency. 'I don't think that there's anything evil or morally wrong with it,' he said. 'I just question whether it's effective.' "
That is the question that has always haunted the people who pay PR practioners, covert or not. But that's not an issue for the Lincoln Group. The client is always right, and the Lincoln Group has 100 million reasons not to question the project. As it happens, I have a real flair for news headlines, especially in Arabic. Just holler, Chris, if you need another freelancer.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at December 2, 2005 01:35 PM