Even when I disagree with Phil Carter, I seldom see him as flatly wrong; our disagreements typically come from a deeper division in how we see the alignment of issues and in relative priorities.
This weekend, though, I think he clinked one. And since it’s on an important topic, and leads to important questions, I want to play it up and see what you all think.
Phil criticizes changes in the DoD web news summary “The Early Bird” in his post “Cooking The Early Bird.” His criticisms are several, and they focus on one core issue:
The thrust of this website and its message is clear to me — the Defense Department hopes to make an end run around the media and put its message out there to the American public. [Ed. note: is this similar to bloggers who criticize the “mainstream media”?] It is trying to shore up public support for its operations by boosting public support for the troops. The hope is that public support for the troops will translate into increased support for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, and that this will sustain U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan longer. The longevity of our operations depends as much on their military success as our political will, and so maintaining public support for these missions is crucial to perseverance there.
Assuming for a minute that he’s made an accurate description of the changes, the conclusion he draws seems sensible, and even laudable.He criticizes the DoD for:
…running National Review Online commentaries and blog notes favorable to the SecDef while ignoring articles in Slate, the American Prospect and the New Republic that were critical.
and uses the example of the Truman Commissions during WW II as support for the notion that challenges are not only a protected exercise of freedom, but useful themselves in the conduct of war:
There was a time, as I’ve read in Geoffrey Stone’s brilliant “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime”, when it was considered patriotic to dissent in wartime and to ask such tough questions. Even during World War II, perhaps our last great patriotic war, this was true. Sen. Harry Truman aggressively chaired a committee during that war which examined war profiteering and unsavory practices by the Pentagon and defense contractors in the procurement field. Gen. George Marshall later told Truman that his committee was worth two divisions to the war effort, and that his criticism as a Senator was one of the highest forms of public service. I fear that we have lost this spirit, both in the halls of Congress and on the fields of public discourse. Every American ought to support the troops, and to support the nation when it is engaged in war. But it remains our patriotic right and duty to question the means and ends for which we have chosen to wage war, so that we may conserve our scarcest and most valuable resource: soldiers.
And here he jumps the shark.
There was, in World War II, very little public discussion of the “whys” of the war once the war began. Those who did question our entry into the war were rapidly marginalized, and in some cases, jailed. The Smith Act of 1940 was used to jail antiwar labor organizer Harry DeBoer and other members of Teamsters Local 574, for example.
In fact, there was a highly developed machine – driven by government intervention – including some classic Warner Brothers cartoons like “Draftee Daffy” and “Fifth Column Mouse”.
William Wyler wasn’t just randomly on board Memphis Belle when she flew her 25th mission over Europe; he was a part of a large, well organized propaganda machine funded as a part of the war effort.
This kind of organized propaganda didn’t end there. Michael Socolow writes about Nightline and the Iranian hostage crisis:
Were the editorial decisions made by the network news executives in 1979 to 1980 in the public interest? This remains a contested question. In their study of the Tehran hostage crisis, veteran journalists Robert Donovan and Ray Scherer detailed the manner in which the students surrounding the American embassy in Tehran exploited television’s power during the crisis. The atmosphere around the embassy resembled a carnival when the TV cameras were absent, but as soon as a camera crew arrived, the crowd chanted “Death to Carter!” and “Death to America!” while waving fists and burning flags.
The mob’s media savvy was so sophisticated that chants would be rendered in English, Persian and, occasionally, for the benefit of Canadian and French television, in French. The students clearly understood how to exploit the independent, non-governmental nature of American broadcasting. They also knew that reaching the American public was relatively easy, as there existed only three American broadcast networks, and all of them dedicated enormous time and resources to coverage of the story.
The Al Qaeda leadership has repeatedly emphasized this lesson to its followers. Reminding its followers of the Tet offensive, the Tehran crisis and the disastrous Somalia mission, Al Qaeda statements reveal the belief that it is far easier to demoralize Americans than to defeat its armed forces. For this reason, beheading videos have become an important strategic tool in Al Qaeda’s arsenal.
Phil challenges the Administration to better express and sell it’s strategy (wow, does that sound familiar – I’ve challenged them aggressively for just the same reason):
The President must articulate a raison d’etre that the American public can get behind. We need to know, as a nation, why we are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President has made a few lofty statements about spreading freedom and democracy, but I don’t think these have been enough. He ought to be criss-crossing the country to pound that message home, so that every military family understands why their loved ones are being sent into harm’s way, and every American family understands why the war is worth it too. This is what being Commmander-in-Chief is all about: public leadership. I think that such leadership would have a positive effect on public support for the war, far beyond any cute Pentagon websites. It might also do wonders for recruiting and retention, but that’s my optimistic take on the matter.
I agree, both that we need a well-articulated explanation of what we’re doing (although events seem to be making that clearer) and that it needs to be better expressed.
Opinion is shaped in three ways:
* You put out a compelling idea and it becomes contagious because it fits with the reality that people understand;
* You aggressively market that idea, both directly (flying around the country making speeches) and indirectly (hiring Warner Brothers to make cartoons and William Wyler to make documentaries);
* You suppress competing ideas (Harry DeBoer).
I think we’d all agree (except Susan Sontag and some others who feel that lack of adulation and immediate agreement constitutes suppression) that #3 is both bad and far less prevalent than it has been at almost any time in history.
I think we’d all agree that more of #1 would be a Good Thing.
How do we feel about #2? On one hand, it’s marketing – expanding the reach of our message. On the other, it’s propaganda, which is a pretty pejorative term.
What should – and can – we do about marketing our ideas?
A free and competative media is the best innoculation against propeganda. If consumers of news are conscientious, read critically & between the lines, and seek alternative sources (for facts) and viewpoints (for meaning), we have nothing to worry about from DoD propeganda. Or at least, if we do fall for propeganda, we ourselves are partly to blame, since the resources to debunk that propganda were available to us with a little extra effort.
I wish that the over-reliance on goverment sources for facts and interpretation, that is so prevalent from the MSM in the areas of consumer safety, the environment, labor stats, and countless other areas, were subject to the same critical scrutiny as is the output of the DoD during wartime.
Well, who reads the Early Bird? How many average American media consumers have ever even heard of it? It’s hard to register for, and many folks will wonder if they even want to draw Big Brother’s attention to themselves. The folks who read it regularly are, I believe, either professionals in the national defense area, or voracious readers of news who obtain a balance, anyway. In artillery terms, it’s a “short round” to try to sway the American public with a site that hardly any of them read.
Method number 2, above, would explode in the government’s face. What happens anytime a journalist who is sometimes favorable to the government is found to have once done paid work for that government? It’s a feeding frenzy for the rest of the MSM.
They need to go with Method Number 1. Every time President Bush opens his mouth on any topic, he also needs to tell a story of good news from Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s lots of it! It wouldn’t have happened at all, without our help. The government doesn’t need propaganda. They need to get the facts out, they need to push primary souces in the press’ face until they can’t fail to report it. The MSM doesn’t notice when 6,482 trucks carrying construction and medical supplies, food or televisions get where they are going on any given day. Let one truck get hit by a gomer with an RPG, and *that’s* above the fold.
I agree that the administration has been pretty timid about telling people the good we’re doing, and I don’t understand that. The MSM, on the other hand, have gone way out of their way to not report the good that is happening. Balance? Fair reporting? Not present. If the MSM can’t find a Tet, they’ll try to make one.
The administration has been grabbing it’s ankles for the press ever since Abu Ghraib. Those little monsters have been punished, but not their negligent lieutenants and colonels. Since then, the administration has hardly said anything. I’m not talking about CENTCOM’s news releases, I’m talking about the people who got elected and who are on TV regularly. They need to be telling the story.
The story of Afghanistan and Iraq is fantastic. It’s just not getting told.
The story about Iraq is Fantasy. The only way to win is to loose and even than victory is not assured
John, why DoD is somewhat scrutiniced is because it matters to a lot of people, especially the details. Department of labour doesn’t matter for most people. Not the details and not even the big picture.
AL,
Phil Carter blew his case out of the water for more reasons than you mention.
First, lets deal with the Truman Myth.
Yes, Truman found a great deal of mismanagement and fraud in the build up for WW2. The whole purpose of the War Department bureaucracy between the world wars was to justify why it should not spend money. Throwing billions of dollars at the War Department and expecting more than gross incompetence was like wishing on a falling star. What you wish for was not going to happen. Truman’s brilliance was that he understood that due to his back ground in the Pendergast machine as its chief honest broker.
Truman record as the great fraud buster is marred by one real bloody failure. He was personally responsible for the great American artillery shell shortage in North West Europe in 1944.
Truman’s committee forced the Army to cut back on artillery shell production in 1943 because the Army’s shell production was outstripping shell usage due to the fact that the majority of American ground forces were not fully engaged in combat. Hundreds if not thousands of American troops in Northwest Europe were killed and wounded in 1944 who might not have otherwise been were it not for the shortage of shells his actions caused.
Had he not later became President; this screw up by Truman would have been the chief fact he would have been remembered for.
Second, Phil Carter also skips over the fact that what he is accusing the Bush Administration of doing with the Early Bird now was in fact done to it by the Clinton Administration in the Mid-1990s.
In the early 1990s The Early Bird was being used by Pentagon to put out it’s version of events to shape the Congressional and institutional Pentagon opposition to a number of Administration policies to include Gays in the Military, Intervention in Bosnia and most especially in forging Administration policy on the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel land mines over the dead bodies of Senator Patrick Leahy, the State Department and a number of Democratic aligned NGOs.
I still have a whole series of Early Bird Clippings I photocopied from that time that I have saved for an article damning the Ottawa AP Land Mine Ban Treaty for the piece of Leftist, Divorced from Reality, feel good about ourselves because it is anti-American, trash it is.
It took the Clinton Administration until 1995 to figure this out and put its people in charge of The Early Bird. There was a spat of complaints over “the loss of editorial independence” then as well. The Early Bird survived.
What Phil is seeing now is that Bush Administration doing the same sorts of adjustments.
As far as I am concerned, big whoop. What part of “The Early Bird is a press organ for the Administation in power” doesn’t he understand?
In one sentence: market them, unapologetically – and ignore the whiners and defeatists.
Just win, baby. There is no acceptable second place.
Which leads us to option #3 – no, it is NOT always bad. The precedents are abundantly clear, and there are indeed times when dangers to the nation as a whole justify the suppression of sedition. There is no good reason to take that off the table, nd a lot of good reasons and precedent not to.
Re: who reads the Early Bird, it is available online as one of many datastreams at the Army’s web portal for military and Army civilian employees. The Army has been doing some rather sophisticated stuff with this portal, ranging from web-based email access with an email address that never changes no matter where you’re posted to online education / training courses and a whole lot more.
Supporting morale at a time of persistent use of media for propaganda purposes by all parties is not exactly explosive expose stuff, Carter notwithstanding. If I may gently and carefully say so, this is an example of how the fact that Carter left the Army as a Captain might limit how he views situations …. someone who has served at the O-6 level might consider the situation a bit different than he does.
Re: who reads the Early Bird, it is available online as one of many datastreams at the Army’s web portal for military and Army civilian employees. The Army has been doing some rather sophisticated stuff with this portal, ranging from web-based email access with an email address that never changes no matter where you’re posted to online education / training courses and a whole lot more.
Supporting morale at a time of persistent use of media for propaganda purposes by all parties is not exactly explosive expose stuff, Carter notwithstanding. If I may gently and carefully say so, this is an example of how the fact that Carter left the Army as a Captain might limit how he views situations …. someone who has served at the O-6 level might consider the situation a bit different than he does.
Yes market. But also market the “Kerry” alternative: leave Saddam to the global testers at the UN — like Sudan.
Not supress competing ideas — fill in the possible “plan” … do not invade; release sanctions; have another toothless resolution or 17 more; allow ALL the surrounding countries to think Saddam is outwitting the US and the UN, since they are not finding any WMDs (and we all know … so it shows how stupid the Americans are and how smart Saddam is).
Recollect how the MSM Rather, etc., was in favor of leaving Vietnam — and how the result was genocide.
bq. The story of Afghanistan and Iraq is fantastic. It’s just not getting told.
Yes, we are in a leftist wishing for failure propaganda bubble. the only reason it isnt even more radical is they are pretty savy on the amount of lies and distortion the public will accept.
bq. Recollect how the MSM Rather, etc., was in favor of leaving Vietnam — and how the result was genocide.
Somewhere north of 4 million murdered when you add Veitmihn and PolPots killing fields together. that dont count the over 500,000 that drowned in the south china sea.
The media didnt exactly inform America about Ho Che Mihns mass murder quota of %5
The other infamous person to dictate out quotas of mass murder to fill was Stalin.
How would the antics of John Kerry and Hanoi Jane et all been percieved if the media had not been pro communist, and actually told America about the crimes against humanity committed by the Veitmihn ?
The hitorical record is replete with our leftist media white washing leftist evil and demonising those opposed to it, all the way back to Murrows carefull editing to make Joe McCarthy look bad.
Left out of the report for example, that in the famous exchange, that Joe McCarthy was dead on target. that he was everything Joe said he was.
bq. What is also omitted is the truly indecent way Welch had been baiting McCarthy with all that day, constantly demanding he name names and implying he couldn’t.
bq. When McCarthy finally succumbed and mentioned a member of Mr. Welch’s own law firm, Fred Fisher, was a member of an organization termed by the Democrat Attorney General as, “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” Welch went into his aggrieved theatrics.
bq. Okay, but was it bad for McCarthy to ‘out’ Fisher even if baited by Welch? Well, it might have been if untrue and if Welch had not confirmed to the New York Times two months previous that Fisher had been relieved as his second assistant because of his membership in an organization that was, “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party”!
bq. So not only was Fischer ‘Red’, Welch knew that he was and publicly acknowledged that fact two months before.
Or a I suppose you could go back even futher, to the Walter Durranties of the 30’s, while stalins mass graves was filling, the media was filling the publics eyes and ears with glorius wonders of the workers paradise.
Or the leftist media fawning over the success of Maos great leap forward, never mind the 27 Million that starved to death and the further 30 million murdered.
No our leftist media has a long history of presenting the most evil of all evils, leftism, in the best possible light, inventing that light when they could get away with it.
Today, we can see nothing has changed. except for the fact they are no longer the only source of information.